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“... a magnificent library, formed the principal nucleus of the Museum founded after his death in 1753. Arthur Macgregor, who has previously co-edited an important work on the history of museums, has gathered here a series of essays by current and former staff of the British and Natural History Museums, who use the 30 extant manuscript catalogues of Sloane’s ...”

“... gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over thirty years successive generations of BBC producers escorting guests through the labyrinthine corridors of Broadcasting House past doors bearing inscrutably coded designations have cheerfully informed them that ...”

“... Friends and contemporaries at the Royal College took inspiration from jazz, spirituals and rumba (Arthur Benjamin), or studied the Second Viennese School and the French group Les Six (Arthur Bliss), but Gurney seemed uninterested in the new music coming out of Europe and America, or even in the English folk revival. He came ...”

“... of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as prime minister also owed much to ...”

“... can be indifferent to dogs, in representation or in the street – not the English. ‘Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!’ He doesn’t like Glinda, the Good Witch, either; the Wicked Witch of the West receives his appreciative notice. This is the old, perhaps oldest, story: that of Satan attracting greater interest than ...”

“... perfectly in place, and legs that were perfectly designed for emerging from skirts that were little more than a pelmet. But – oh what a waste of temporary good fortune – none of that mattered. My 17th birthday present was a haircut at Evansky’s, as stylish a hairdresser as Vidal Sassoon at the time; the place where hair was cut into the essential ...”

“... with the boilerplate blandness of the three titles, which might have escaped from the pen of Sir Arthur Bryant and fail to convey the impish iconoclasm and acid acuity that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not ...”

“... stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty much decided to ...”

“... the rest has good touches, but is not overall so very much better, though Southam, perhaps moved a little by that handwriting, makes the best possible literary case for it. He is able to do so because of his hypothesis, already quoted, concerning the date at which the first act was written. Everything turns, if Southam is right, upon the fact that ...”

“... rewarding second time around is not that this is an interviewer’s cut, so to speak – very little of interest was excised for the magazine edition: it’s simply that the perplexing contradictions it revealed at the time seem easier to grasp in retrospect. They’re still interesting: rock and roll fundamentalism v. avant-gardism; therapy ...”

“... of getting to know the pregnant matter that clogs the space between our ears. Descartes had little difficulty in locating the seat of the soul. Having adopted the skull as its vessel, he needed to find a centre of unification amid what seemed to be a confusion of duplicated detectors: two eyes to see with, two ears to hear with and two hands to feel ...”

“... who stand out, not only for their personal achievements, but for the way they always seem a little in advance of what is about to happen. It is at limes as if they were possessed of a kind of prescience, a prophetic understanding of what should come next.’ Since Sidney Bernstein’s prophetic understanding has consisted chiefly in a canny, highly ...”

“... then had plenty of room in which to attack. Such at least are the kind of tales old Kaspar told little Wilhelmine and Peterkin in Southey’s ballad. Like Blenheim, Zama was a famous victory for someone or other. Tolstoy would have been sceptical, maintaining that no general ever had any control over a battle, in which determined and contingent factors ...”

“... size of travelling trunks. And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,   When the noisy little kids are in their bunks. The second complaint: unlike Ricks, Karlin doesn’t tell you when the poems were written or first published, so it’s hard to verify one’s sense of cultural changes from one year or decade to another. Without dates, many of ...”