“... on the doomed liner and the stories are both absurdly delicious and irresistibly sad. Mahala Douglas, wife of the Quaker Oats heir, sat at the table where Captain Smith was dining with, among others, Eleanor Widener, wearing her $250,000 pearl necklace, and her husband, the Philadelphia businessman George Widener. They were on their way home from ...”

“... and Pigalle. The heroine of ‘La Foule’ is jostled by a jubilant crowd celebrating a feast day. She is pushed into the arms of a stranger, with whom she falls in love, only to be dragged away from him again by the crowd, ‘who dance a mad farandole’ that drowns out the sound of her beloved’s voice. She ‘clenches her fists’ and curses the crowd ...”

“... which collapsed in the early Nineties, while Scargill continued to hang on – as he does to this day – to the presidency of a union which is now in toto less than half the size of the Yorkshire area he inherited in 1973. This support never went without saying. Other figures, less flamboyant though undoubtedly more loyal, could rely on the Party for more ...”

“... round to read him their verse in the hope that one thing might lead to another. However, on the day appointed it was not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said: ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history of literature. Or maybe just gossip. And on that score ...”

“... one statement on the record from the outset. ‘This,’ he proclaimed, ‘is the most humble day of my life.’ As the American satirist Jon Stewart observed, Murdoch wasn’t so humbled that he was willing to wait his turn to speak. But his very presence in Portcullis House represented an extraordinary turnaround. After dominating British journalism for ...”

“... Bakst among her friends. ‘I’m in a complete rut. I lunch and dine with Linda Thomas every day, and between times, call her up on the telephone,’ he wrote to his bosom buddy from Yale, the actor Monty Woolley. ‘She happens to be the most perfect woman in the world and I’m falling so in love with her that I’m attractively triste.’ A banquet of ...”

“... has traditionally been among those given a private briefing by the chancellor of the Exchequer the day after a new budget is presented. At some points in its history, it may have seemed like a cross between the Spectator and the Banker, at others an amalgam of Time and Investors’ Chronicle, but it now has a unique position in the global media landscape ...”

“... At 5’4”, he would have towered over her. He made paper crowns for the vinegary art critic Douglas Cooper and his scarcely less acerbic biographer John Richardson, and taught them how to bow properly for his royal wedding (another example of how artists’ jokes are almost as unfunny as musicians’).Brown takes the fantasy a stage further by imagining ...”

“... the connoisseur, gallery owner and dealer who championed many of the great artists of his day, including Picasso, Juan Gris and Braque. Leiris seemed to know everyone without having scurried from soirée to soirée: the dumbwaiter simply arrived at the floor where the most illustrious guests were dining and he was delivered up for their ...”

“... the Forties he was excited by the rattling rhetoric of the Apocalyptic poets, believing that the day of Audens and MacNeices was over, that poetry ‘must now be positive and prophetic’, and discovering those qualities in the work of Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. For him, apocalypse was always in the air or round the corner, and he had ‘something in the ...”

“... dress Is sexual and she fingers it, the tent Above her like a conquering glans, it’s God Day-dreaming a new gender for the war In Heaven: a marvellous smile which runs Through flesh del parto, headlong on to love. This is knowingly allusive, sophisticated and wry: it knows not only the painting but, probably, some of the most recent criticism of the ...”

“... funds from the Wolfson Foundation and the British Government. I have condensed this latter-day story from Robert Knox’s 1992 monograph, which for the first time gives a detailed description of the whole Amaravati collection, including the pieces still in storage. The publication of Knox’s beautifully illustrated book, which builds on the work of a ...”

“... was referred to the party’s Scottish Council Executive, which met on Saturday, 22 June 1974, the day Scotland’s football team played Yugoslavia in a televised World Cup game. Although the meeting was quorate, only 11 members of the Council Executive – there were more than thirty – turned up, and voted by six to five to reject a devolution ...”

“... without work. He adapted it for the stage and then worked on the screenplay (the film starred Kirk Douglas and Dany Robin). When Hayes returned to the US, he began a new life as a member of the American middle class. A hatchet job on Eugene Lyons, whose book The Red Decade criticised the infatuation of American intellectuals with Stalin in the 1930s, was the ...”

“... jokes about the boss telling his wife: ‘I’ve had a terrible time, dear, I had to spend the day working with the typewriter on my knees.’ I imagine some similar jest might be devised for the laptop computer, but I can’t be bothered. Roland Barthes anguished over the problem of the literary division of labour before word processors arrived and solved ...”