“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at ease among the highbrows’. Sexually too he was ambivalent, attracted to both Tom Mitford, with whom he had been at school, and Tom’s sister Diana, with whom he was for years in love. He remained bisexual for most of his life. A further episode of doubtful veracity in Another Self, according to ...”

“... were genuinely lyrics, set to be sung by (and sometimes it seems written in collaboration with) Henry and William Lawes. These poems often have a perfectly unambiguous clarity of theme and language as though they are a single musical line designed to stand out from its setting. Herrick’s lyrical simplicity and directness of expression had an enormous ...”

“... is a long and salutary way from that of the judge who in 1797 directed the jury trying Tom Paine’s publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy that the Christian religion was part of the law of England. In these and endless other ways, the UK’s constitution changes constantly, blown by winds of which the actors are barely aware. Who today would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... labelled ‘autofiction’ – was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused by Jen ...”

“... since it will do him no good). Competence, however, is not enough. Like the philosopher in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul, the difference between ‘John ate well’ (i.e. a lot) and ‘John ate well’ (i.e. in an elegant way), Castiglione’s courtiers know that adverbs can have many meanings. The courtier must not only do his job well ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry Luce (the owner/editor of Time-Life), whose ideological position was quite the opposite of Partisan’s at the time; in return for this largesse PR apparently restrained itself and said nothing about big corporations. Later Allen Dulles (CIA chief and ...”

“... Mies van der Rohe laid down by first-generation historians such as Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (Pevsner published Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936; Giedion Space, Time and Architecture in 1941; and Hitchcock The International Style: Architecture since 1922, with Philip Johnson, in 1932). Banham was distant enough in time and ...”