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“... of the divide, or oscillating between them, often referring to herself as two separate people, by day a woman in society, by night a man writing into the early hours. In any event, Sand did not drop her pseudonym when, before long, her cover was blown, but instead revelled in her double identity. In 1833 she had a brief affair with the actress Marie Dorval ...”

“... hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ...”

“... of Peacock Pie is taken from ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s ...”

“... fret with a sense of missed opportunity throughout a long retirement. On the evening of Christmas Day, after Ferguson had fallen asleep in front of the TV, they held a meeting and decided to take him on. ‘In the kitchen,’ he writes, ‘a mutiny was brewing.’ The conspirators emerged into the open to confront him. ‘The chief rebel came in and kicked my ...”

“... optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting … political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ...”

“... Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something ...”

“... as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains. In Britain a militant anti-Hughes faction took to chiselling his ...”

“... Forster forged a famously durable relationship with the Buckinghams, was godfather to their son Robin (who died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1962), and chose to die at their house in Coventry. ‘I have never so known anyone before,’ he writes in 1943, and marvels that Bob ‘has been living and moving against me for 13 years’. So he confounded his earlier ...”

“... are answerable – politically to Parliament, legally to the courts. That the government of the day has no separate sovereignty in this paradigm is both axiomatic and a reminder of the sharpest of all the lessons of Eastern Europe: that it is when state is collapsed into party that democracy founders. To assume a jurisdiction of this kind is of course to ...”

“... he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He thought that when he reached the brink of the world he would find a large pit, and would be able to look down and see the secrets of the universe. He spent the whole day rambling among ...”

“... singer and activist whose rich, deep gospel voice adorns Staple Singers numbers like ‘Uncloudy Day’. They had met in New York in the early 1960s and, in her words, ‘court[ed] awhile’. These pages are alive with mental movement, as poets’ drafts always are, and it occurs to me that these multiple studio takes – all these ...”

“... portly practitioner is unlikely to have sought the informed consent of either Christopher Robin or his parents before he gave him what goes for a cold in the nose and some more for a cold in the head. Nor, probably, would he have done so before performing a tonsillectomy (which may be why a whole generation has been pointlessly deprived of this ...”

“... Fair, dispensing justice to the just. Pearson shades the portrait to reveal the Twins as a pair of Robin Hoods, by way of Papa Doc Duvalier. The difference between Pearson and the B-team that followed in his footsteps is that he became a ghost before the corpse had died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and ...”

“... his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign ...”

“... history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them ...”