“... 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 ...”

“... on bass, but the first thing we hear is the lugubriously reassuring voice of the producer, Tom Wilson, announcing ‘“Dime Store” – Take 1’. This is one of a number of unfamiliar early titles, for these are songs still in the making. Thus ‘She Belongs to Me’ is first slated as ‘My Girl’ and later as ‘Worse than Money’; and Highway ...”

“... Moses Jackson, his unswervingly heterosexual Oxford contemporary – is all-determining. He had, Tom Stoppard wrote, ‘an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unfitted for it, and never for a moment inclined to call upon it’ – and from whom, in Laurence Housman’s laconic ...”

“... man with birdlike features, giving a whispery commentary on his photographs in a voice which Tom Hopkinson, Brandt’s editor at Picture Post, described as ‘as loud as a moth’, and which even in 1983 retained more than a shadow of a German accent. Shuffling through his pictures, Brandt is gentle, polite, obliging, but unforthcoming. The interviewer ...”

“... uses two remorselessly productive diarists to cast light on very different class experiences. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was dead at 61, nine years before the 1967 Act decriminalised the kind of affairs he’d been having before, during and after his marriage to the fabulously wealthy Honor Guinness. Parker gives us extracts from Chips’s diaries, during ...”

“... that could live up to the claims for it made by politicians of all three parties. But it can’t. Henry Overman, professor of economic geography at the LSE, was once a paid adviser to the scheme. ‘HS2 is poor value for money compared with other transport plans,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 16 November 2013, ‘and may well be poor value for money ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House ...”