“... wrote: ‘Don’t let Lord George fall down the fucking stairs’ in boot polish on the landing wall. The japes were taking a nightmarish turn and in an uneasy political climate grand schemes were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the ...”

“... her teeth so you can’t see her smile. Back in the US, Bouvier got engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street stockbroker, but once her mother learned that he earned just $17,000 a year, the engagement was called off. She made gestures towards an entry-level position at the CIA and won the Paris Prize at Vogue – six months working at the magazine in Paris ...”

“... of themselves when they imagine they are performing for an audience of one. On the strength of Richard Mangan’s edition, we must assume that Gielgud’s contribution to the documenting of theatrical history will be uncertain (‘I had never noticed that Albee had such big ears!’) while his contribution to the understanding of bad character is ...”

“... It’s hard to imagine the chair of the BBC board arranging an £800,000 loan for Starmer, as Richard Sharp did for Johnson. But speaking to people within Labour you get the sense that the party often doesn’t recognise the tension between private interests and public office, especially when those involved are what one person described as ‘members of ...”

“... or by collaging them, or simply by using them as source material, as with work by Francis Bacon or Richard Hamilton. Photography has long been used by artists as a substitute for drawing or as an iconic intermediary between reality and representation.Richter makes use of photographs in a way which is both extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, and extremely ...”

“... is a good Frost to have and keep in the canon. Nothing can replace ‘Birches’ and ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘The Hill Wife’ and the late, brokenhearted ‘Directive’. But even in his wearier books, when Frost was too often able to summon only a thought and a form – instead of his magical combination of a feeling, a thought and a form – there are ...”

“... around in a very characteristic way, and blurted out his answer in a fast, high-pitched voice. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I think I see exactly what you mean, and it’s fascinating, but really I don’t see why "suburban". Aren’t you trying to be too – specific? I don’t see why suburban has anything to do with it. I really don’t think it has.’ At ...”

“... to Joy’ with hand movements as slight as those of someone adjusting a picture hanging on the wall. Richard Strauss excoriated conductors who used their left hand at all and the rare video footage of him conducting his own work in his final years suggests that he did most of the heavy lifting with his eyes. Boulez ...”

“... knowing that if one person walked into me I was finished … I crept along, clinging to the wall, emaciated, etiolated, wrapped up in jackets and scarves and hat and feeling very conspicuously a PWA.’ At the end, he was almost totally blind: ‘I can hear the splash and swish of car tyres on wet tarmac outside my window and I can hear rain rapping ...”

“... off and opened [her] purse, and took a pistol out, saw a stack of Marilyns leaning against the wall, shot it right between the eyes in the forehead, and then put the gun away and put her gloves back on and left’.Among those who joined the circle was Edie Sedgwick, who became Warhol’s inseparable companion for social outings. Having come into a ...”

“... a poet be a novelist? Why not?’ Then, in late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live ...”

“... making a number of smoothly-meshing points around central images – crusade, change, the future. Richard Nixon, for his part, was apt to jump from dignity to folksiness, as if the strain of keeping up a high tone was too much. The most deviant of the post-war acceptance speeches was Harry Truman’s in 1948. Today, if you read the speech rather than ...”

“... battery sets nevertheless remained in demand even when most people had mains electricity, because wall points were sparely provided, often only one per house. Mains sets were heavily promoted by the industry but only became generally affordable with the Philco of 1935, which cost just over £5 and was billed as the People’s Set – and here I must raise a ...”

“... Studies of allergy incidences in the two parts of Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, found them to be lower in the heavily polluted East. Nevertheless, the risk society provides many opportunities for practitioners eager to exploit its fears. Jackson’s excellent account of clinical ecologists who battled with the allergy ...”

“... been fucking with a Stalinist,” hissed a man in Hornsey, pinning me against the wall at a party.’ Was this the beginning of the Women’s Movement? Rowbotham began to get involved in a Women’s Liberation consciousness-raising group. ‘I was convinced that women could make a unique contribution to radical thinking about ...”