“... then subjugated other continents, French and above all British colonisers and their home audiences took the Athenian line. Cultural and physical differences became rungs on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping ...”

“... the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use … When you move your ...”

“... grudges, he now sometimes takes part in respectful online discussions with former enemies such as John McDonnell, who stood against him for the Labour leadership in 2007. This relatively short biography devotes four chapters to Brown’s life after Downing Street. Here, as throughout the book, the tone is occasionally critical but essentially ...”

“... the freehold of Skyline Chambers. The plain low-ceilinged rooms are decorated with paintings he took from his flat, along with a metre-long model of the Titanic, a childhood obsession, but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in ...”

“... state.) Stern’s ancestors on both sides were among the great and the good. One, Sigismund Asch, took part in the 1848 revolution, was jailed for his liberal commitment, and went on to become a city councillor in Breslau and a revered citizen. He took special care to treat the indigent in his medical practice. One of ...”

“... business of rewriting for the actors takes up a lot of time in America. I am still surprised that John Malkovich agreed to play Valmont without having it written in his contract that he didn’t have to die. It would have left him available for Dangerous Liaisons II. Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about ...”

“... from the rest of the world. This can go too far. Some of her narration has a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese said to ...”

“... settled for a while in Portugal and eventually retired to Italy, where Maestro Sabatini took pupils, among them the Irish tenor and future Papal Count John McCormack. Rafael spent much of his boyhood with his maternal grandparents in Liverpool and always regarded England as his home. At 17 he started work as a ...”

“... own. Under this heady new influence Jack wrote the story that won him his first publication (in John O’ London’s Weekly) and first fee (six guineas). His first novel to be accepted was also a Saroyanesque essay, Green to Pagan Street, though The Trouble with Harry was published first. By about 1950 he was doing well enough to set up as a full-time ...”

“... political movement. In April 1937 an international commission, headed by the philosopher John Dewey, assembled in Mexico to enquire into the Stalinist charges of conspiracy against Trotsky, and pronounced a verdict totally exonerating him. This was no doubt useful in influencing world opinion in Trotsky’s favour; but a 1938 manifesto signed by ...”

“... at least equally absorbing in Florence. ‘One of them, called Adriana, was so witty she literally took away your breath: you were scared to respire in case you missed a wisecrack.’ This sentence, in describing a temporary apnoea, validates the adverb ‘literally’, without actually specifying the wit that caused the fit. Still, here was a kindred spirit ...”

“... Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II orphaned siblings maternally descended from John Jacob Astor. The eldest orphan had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers ...”

“... some memorable examples. My own favourite is an episode, still remembered in some circles, which took place in the Royal Court Theatre in 1958. The Tynans have taken Logue to see a play about a man who found God while being tortured by the Nazis: The Tenth Chance by Stuart Holroyd. The hero is on stage, tied to a chair, being beaten by Gestapo officers while ...”

“... as hiccoughs, which would disappear of their own accord when growth resumed. Even those who took a longer view had grounds for hope. Industrial society was clearly more difficult to govern than it had been twenty years before, but – in Britain as elsewhere – it looked as though the difficulties were being tackled. We had joined the EEC under Heath ...”

“... of the property speculator, and slowly the local political establishment – ruled in Southwark by John O’Grady and his hand-picked ‘mafia’ of loyal Bermondsey councillors – began to listen to the siren songs of the speculators whose seductive promises of high rate income, ‘planning gain’, and glamorous architectural gigantisme, led them inexorably ...”