“... been toppled after a three-month struggle and in March 1970 the country was in the throes of its first ever general election campaign. I was travelling to every major town and many smaller ones, interviewing opposition politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation ...”

“... and impressively active in determining how she was to be perceived. She got her retaliation in first. She taunted her putative tormentors. She used them to her advantage, whatever that was. It might be seeing off the rugby player Will Carling, a lover she was bored by. Carling’s friend Gary Lineker warned him: ‘That woman is trouble.’ The element of ...”

“... has not simply analysed markets but helped create them, starting in 1972 with the world’s first currency futures exchange, the International Monetary Market. Those influenced by Friedman – most famously the ‘Chicago boys’ in Pinochet’s Chile, but also US, Japanese and British economic policy-makers in the 1980s – reshaped entire national ...”

“... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn arrived in the Bay Area that same ...”

“... the few enduring characters in postwar British fiction. We watch Biswas become a sign-writer (his first work, for a neighbour, is ‘Idlers Keep Out by Order’), and then a journalist at the Trinidad Sentinel. A dreamer, he likes to read fictional descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries. Eager to write his own stories, he corresponds with the ...”

“... detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or the Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ...”

“... with considerable flair. While most pieces have some virtues, some are really exceptionally good. Ruth Harris’s account in Volume Two of the feud between Charcot’s Paris school and Bernheim’s coterie at Nancy, over the value (and risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more sordid ...”

“... asks, but avoids answering, what might be called the ‘cream cake’ questions. She quotes first from the apologetic opening of Agnes Sapper’s (exceptional) biography of her (unexceptional) mother, Pauline Brater: Who is Mrs Brater, or who was she? Why should we take an interest in her? Was she an artist, a scholar, a benefactress for mankind? Did ...”

“... of Art’s Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983, which it resembles in many respects. The ‘first tribute to a living designer at such a high-profile institution’, according to the fashion journalist Holly Brubach, the Saint Laurent show ‘was hailed by people in and around the industry as a sign that finally the rest of the world was giving fashion ...”

“... onto the offprint of a friend’s article. I postponed calling in pest control, however, till the first sting. Baths and showers became occasions of suppressed anxiety; my invaders emerged from any number of orifices in the cupboard containing the boiler, which overhangs the tub. But their numbers declined with the onset of autumn. Soon I thought myself ...”

“... things, especially about her children, and her ‘heart sinks’.Born Lady Anne Coke, she was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ...”

“... of ‘mon grand ami Auguste Rodin’, to whom the second (1908) volume was dedicated: Rilke had first gone to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin, in 1902. In 1905 his wife, Clara, herself a sculptor and a former pupil of Rodin’s, arranged for Rilke to serve as the great man’s secretary. The ground note of all these years, probably strenuously denied by ...”

“... of others. In her study of the 18th century, for instance, she repeats what a number of scholars (Ruth Perry especially) have already dealt with, and this should be more openly recognised. Even more striking is the paucity of literary quotation, and the almost total absence of quotation from, or reference to, novels; the exception is Philip Roth’s The ...”

“... betters, the ruling gentry and nobility, with a supporting cast of self-interested clergy? The first question has been in many ways badly framed. For one thing, the Pilgrimage was not a monolith. The articulated grievances of Richmondshire and Westmorland had to do with rents and entry fines; the issues in Lincolnshire fell within a category which we ought ...”

“... was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in December 1977, it was examined closely, perhaps for the first time, and the experts apparently concurred in finding that the play was essentially by Jane Austen after all. Brian Southam, in the Introduction to his edition, gives the line of reasoning: ‘Grandison’ is over fifty pages long. For all its lightness ...”