“... scarcely read the newspapers, relying on a press summary prepared for her by her spokesman Henry James, a career civil servant who had worked for both Heath and Wilson and was as grave and imposing a figure as his literary namesake. When James was succeeded by Bernard Ingham, who had worked for Barbara Castle, presentation certainly hotted up. Ingham ...”

“... In the song ‘Alma’ – written soon after her obituaries appeared in December 1964 – Tom Lehrer imagines all modern women being jealous of her ‘for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she had great beauty. As a young woman, Alma Schindler, Emil’s oldest daughter, was said to be ‘the loveliest girl ...”

“... popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in ...”

“... minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about his family’s clear-eyed acceptance of him), some do not. It’s noticeable that in Sterling Karat Gold the only families (apart from Chachki Smok’s mother, not characterised apart from being ...”

“... Feldene I had to be put on the acid-suppressant pills that I’ve been on ever since. 14 January. Tom Stoppard rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it ...”

“... Even when he illustrates his theoretical argument with an impressively bravura social reading of Henry Green’s Party Going (a rejoinder to Kermode’s hermeneutic reading in The Genesis of Secrecy) the text never loses its formal identity by being treated as a disturbed and disturbing meditation on the themes of its moment. Nor would it gain anything in ...”

“... fragile, breakable person,’ I said. ‘Dunne seems like an odd choice as husband.’ ‘Oh, no, Tom, you’re completely wrong,’ Nora said. ‘It’s John Gregory Dunne who’s fragile and ready to crack. Joan is like iron.’ Nora was emphatic:My husband always said Joan was an inside-out person. Most people are tough on the outside, vulnerable on the ...”

“... His future wife, Coretta Scott, had attended the 1948 Progressive Party Convention that nominated Henry Wallace for President (grist for J. Edgar Hoover’s mill). But beginning with Montgomery, the movement continually radicalised King, and the first step in that process was religious. Questioning his commitment in the face of threats to himself and his ...”

“... Dover ‘guarded as the most precious of relics until the ceremonies on the next day’. Not since Henry V’s bones were brought back from France (after his body had been boiled to clean them) can there have been such a solemn translation. The Cenotaph in the Mall – which is empty – was dedicated the same day. Edwin Lutyens only provided a sketch, as he ...”

“... of the master as well as his collaboration but no equivalent grace. Both Blesh’s biography and Tom Dardis’s Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (1979) are flat-footed. Keaton, who had only one day of formal education, was a man of few words, many of them mumbled. Even his own so-called autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), co-written ...”

“... his subjects – close enough to capture the warmth radiating from their skin. Novelists such as Henry James and Proust seem to want to reduce the distance between themselves and their characters virtually to nothing – to bore into their characters’ skulls and take us with them. Cather, rather more conservatively, locates herself about four or five feet ...”

“... shorts were long and baggy, and goalies usually wore cloth caps.’ Such great pros as Tom Finney and Jimmy Dickinson remained in aura (and even in income) supremely talented artisans. Greyhound racing and speedway enjoyed their brief heydays, and as Paul Addison observes, these were also sports ‘with a strongly working-class character. Their ...”

“... and liked to dine with cats, whose paws he licked clean. Silberman includes a chapter about Henry Cavendish, a pathologically shy scientific polymath whose many breakthroughs include the 1766 discovery of hydrogen; ‘The way to talk to Cavendish is never to look at him,’ the astronomer Francis Wollaston was to say of him. Both books also rightly flay ...”

“... or as President Trump puts it, ‘from shithole countries’. There’s The Melting Pot Mistake by Henry Pratt Fairchild, Our Country by Josiah Strong, The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. Of particular interest is Carl Campbell Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence (1923). Apart from being a rampant racist, Brigham was a leading ...”

“... The Sunday night meetings on Bath Street in the city centre that Maclean began in late 1914 are Henry Bell’s nomination, in his biography of Maclean, for ‘the birthplace of Red Clydeside’.The city itself became a huge armaments factory: the Clyde Munitions Area. Most of the industrial unrest during the war took place in the engineering ...”