“... anxious to place themselves in a context, try hard to evoke it. Sylvia Lawson, a descendant of Henry Lawson, was a pioneer –the pioneer – Australian woman literary journalist in the Fifties. In the editorial office of Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation magazine in George Street, Sydney, she would elegantly sip the wine ...”

“... as if everybody she knew in the art and photography worlds was there, including Emile de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the pop art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull.’ Bosworth’s concentration on the sex-and-society aspect ...”

“... young Victorian dandies picked up their style from Pelham, and public schoolboys their slang from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and its successors. In this respect, the novel is less the mirror reflection than one of the many generators of Victorian language. Dipped into, Phillipps’s book is full of interesting facts about the fluid changes of English across ...”

“... adds less obvious texts (like Gayton’s Notes Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish ...”

“... feels it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the novels of Thackeray, Meredith and Trollope frequently take their very form from a social absolute – who is and who isn’t – which must be fundamentally unreal. ‘Evan ...”

“... 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 ...”