“... For the next decade or so, intellectual polemicists like Volney and Dupuis; Erasmus Darwin and Tom Paine promoted the notion that in this respect Christianity was originally like other religions and so no better than it should be. Hamilton led the way by writing a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the Secretary of the Dilettanti, in which he described the ...”

“... its crank-handle, the brawn of Hercules to make it start. The future lay with gasoline. In 1908, Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, priced at a level which Ford’s own $5-a-day workers could afford, gave oil-based fuel (of which America was then the world’s main producer) a commercial edge. In 1912, the electric starter and the regenerating ...”

“... Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of rising above them. But this is scarcely to say anything new: ‘too little, too late’ has been the general verdict here in America. Few people ...”

“... unsteady, weak, dizzy – reeling.’ ‘I should have answered, but was upset and ill over Tom’s operation.’ ‘Since coming back to London I have been in despair. I mean real despair, which isolates and freezes one. (I don’t much believe in despair which seeks sympathy and comfort, do you?)’ She had colitis, influenza, pneumonia, shingles and ...”

“... arrangements and resplendent sunsets. It is hard not to see them as playful swipes at Hans Arp and Henry Moore; they also seem to parody the notion that our first painting is our infantile smearing of poo, a psychoanalytic cliché that, thanks to Piero Manzoni and others, had become an avant-garde one as well. Often this collision of high and low was a matter ...”

“... uprisings. Sometimes they followed through: the anarchist Alexander Berkman severely wounded Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s chairman and the man who, together with Carnegie, had presided over the bloodshed at Homestead; Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President William McKinley in 1901; and an anarchist’s bomb exploded at the San Francisco Preparedness ...”

“... Rats had already been used for some time to teach dissection in European medical schools, and Henry Donaldson, a neurologist at the Wistar Institute who had been searching for an animal for his own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility ...”

“... came in two parts. The first, from 1966, is ‘No. 9: Humour’, embodied in the cover of The Tom Lehrer Song Book. It was the first book that Parr bought, and he loved the ‘brilliant, cutting songs’. Lehrer’s death in July is another moment that has overtaken Parr’s book, but he had stopped writing and performing in the 1970s, giving various ...”

“... that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ‘put under pressure’ by MI5 to inform on the Communist Party (he was an uninhibited homosexual cruiser) until, Andrew deduces, he was shopped by Anthony Blunt and expelled from the Party by Pollitt in 1941. If, however, we set on one side the ...”

“... gentleman with counters instead of silver’, and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by ...”

“... my visit to Frank I went with friends to visit the grave of the Anglo-Welsh Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. We read aloud a passage from Vaughan’s ‘great poem’, as Frank rightly called it, ‘The Night’, a great and quite a cryptic poem. The passage was discussed by him in a sermon, learned, lucid, by no means arcane, one of his finest ...”

“... and the theme park after World War Two. As the modern-day animator and animators’ union head Tom Sito records in Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions (which contains the best account yet of the 1941 Walt Disney strike, with documentation of the union side), ‘even Walt’s fiercest critics still confess a warm spot for him. People ...”

“... would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of disengagement: ‘Russian poetry even today keeps the formality of structure, the regular positioning of rhyme, and the canonical metres.’ The risk of falsifying this is the ‘problem’ English translators ...”

“... have extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions of her father, who ‘would let fall from time to time a grim and gnomic apophthegm, which we treasured as a household word’, she mirrors one of ...”

“... John Wayne Gacy was one of many serial killers and mass murderers infatuated with John Wayne. Henry Kissinger is another. ‘I’ve always acted alone,’ he has said. ‘Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy ... entering the village or city alone on his horse ... A Wild West tale, if you like.’ Pat Buchanan, too, has tried to ...”