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“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... Carl Van Vechten, I doubt she could. Her skin was described by one interviewer as the colour of ‘brown honey’, by another as ‘maple syrup’, but the darkness of her complexion was never enough to quash rumours that she was passing in Harlem. The heroines of her novels are loners, alienated from both Black and white communities, but forced to masquerade ...”

“... sly boasting, a rosy tone of remembrance that leaves mildew. On the death of the actress Pamela Brown, who had a withered leg, he recalls spending a day in her hotel suite, confessing his ‘then horrible secret’ about his erotic preference, which she accepts and indulges beyond his imaginings: ‘yes, I spanked the lovely cripple,’ he writes (‘the ...”

“... of a second-century Greek original – was tendentious, to say the least. An Egyptologist at Brown University, Leo Depuydt, found a ‘colossal double blunder’ in the Coptic grammar. As a younger man, Depuydt had once warned the Oxford journal Discussions in Egyptology not to publish a grammatically flawed version of a Gnostic text. They went ahead ...”

“... the idea when it occurred to him that they might then go on to incinerate his beloved Reform Club.Peter Stansky has written a double biography of Philip and his sister Sybil, who married the Marquess of Cholmondeley and brought her own great art collection to fill a few of the gaps at his house at Houghton left by the sale of Sir Robert Walpole’s collection ...”

“... and used poison gas against Ethiopia. Only Red Cross delegates – notably the energetic Sidney Brown – had proof of this. The League of Nations asked the ICRC to testify, but the President, Max Huber, invoked neutrality and discretion, and declined. Under the organisation’s mandate, this was entirely justifiable. The Italians were happy, and went on to ...”

“... morphine for pain, because he seemed so close to death. In New Problems in Medical Ethics (1956), Peter Flood, a Benedictine, stated that Christians in pain should accept suffering ‘as permitted by God for our betterment’. Pain was a ‘privilege, in union with the redemptive sufferings of Christ’. It was essential that a physician tell people they ...”

“... readiness to kill to achieve these ends. The coloured races, the ‘swarms of black and brown’, were unlikely to meet the ‘new needs of efficiency’, he argued, and he equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews. The eventual disappearance of separate races would be the outcome of a gradual process of assimilation and attrition. This has not ...”

“... them Hugh Stephenson, Business Editor of the Times, and Labour’s recent convert, Peter Hain), adding a prologue and epilogue of his own. This original enterprise is certainly illuminating in its revelation of the reasons why a handful of ordinary people with varied experience belong to, and in many cases are active in, the Labour Party. Their ...”

“... We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad’. To be sure, this batch of 19th-century travellers’ tales features some astounding liars, but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses ...”

“... Aryan god-men, now nearing extinction, reasserted themselves in triumph against the dark-haired, brown-eyed, non-Aryan forces of evil and degeneracy, the whole representing a remote, religious allegory of the struggle of Germans against non-Germans in the Empire. There is otherwise no evidence that Hitler was in any significant way at any time in contact ...”

“... their gratitude by electing a man in a monkey-suit as mayor, an event which may finally have sent Peter Mandelson round the bend.) But Blair has not yet been able to embrace the referendum that Goldsmith among others forced him to sign up for, the one on Britain’s entry into the euro. The reason, of course, is not the will of the people, but the will of the ...”

“... quaffers – in the current book, Shane MacGowan – and scenesters of all professions, the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael Winner, Emin again and Jarvis Cocker, whom she wanted to impress so much when he came to her house, she hid the pot-pourri. But she’s a little nervous – though she pretends ...”