“... have no question about it,’ Daniel Selznick – David’s son from his first marriage – said to Stein. ‘I’m not looking forward to seeing this in print, but it’s the truth. Let’s be honest with each other, it’s horribly damning. He was so selfish, so needful to protect his own reputation.’ Jones’s older son, Bob Walker, remembers ...”

“... guests could do about their older faces. As late as 1912 the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal said that ‘men continued to see rouge as a mark of sex and sin.’ That same year, however, twenty thousand women, watched by half a million onlookers, marched in New York City for the right to vote: the leaders, who included some society ladies, wore bright ...”

“... knows, is barking mad: ditto, therefore, the theories he espouses. And in any case, people said, where did he get the idea that MI5 would have been clever enough to pull off such a chancy execution? The whole idea was nonsense. The fact remained that in Egypt – and probably throughout the Arab world – few people were ready to accept that the lovers ...”

“... a blunt-speaking man – had he meant the shared experience of soldiers in wartime, he would have said so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In ...”

“... had a pronounced streak of family piety. Commenting on The Man Within, his rich uncle ‘Eppy’ (Edward) told him: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ In his memoir, Greene stages his puzzlement at this remark: ‘I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two ...”

“... and an important feature of his view of life; but he was seriously ‘unsettled’, as Edward Mendelson says, and had acquired ‘a profound new sense of menace and dread’.He had become professor of poetry at Oxford in 1956, although he was still mainly living in New York, and in 1958 he had shifted his summer residence from Ischia to a small ...”

“... her one in token of our union.’ Their relationship ‘would be as good as a marriage’, Ann had said. ‘Yes,’ said Anne, ‘quite as good or better.’ Earlier she had broached the subject with her aunt. ‘My aunt seemed very well pleased at my choice and prospects. I said she had ...”

“... which were at their peak last summer, when the Guardian and others first got their hands on Edward Snowden’s documents – was that we’re all being watched all the time. Anything we do online, and any phone call we make, is potentially being analysed by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the ...”

“... that some of them spoke no English. That was probably hardly true even then, and the government of Edward VI had no hesitation in massacring them for their obduracy. Early translations into major modern European languages followed, for diplomatic purposes, to demonstrate to potential Roman Catholic royal brides or their anxious advisers that the English ...”

“... 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 anathema to Auden himself, who, wanting no biography, would have been appalled to read this blow-by-blow-account of his ...”

“... simple loyalty to the landowner. Russell’s life was not remarkable, on the surface. Evelyn Waugh said he was ‘exquisitely entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot. When Russell died in 1947 he was described in the Times as ‘that most endearing of Somerset farmers’ – the best tribute ...”

“... Just the place for a snark, the Bellman said. And with equal assurance, political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal ...”

“... actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted abridgement. Dover’s proper two-volume edition in paperback is a faithful (since facsimile) reproduction of the definitive 1936 version of Doughty, complete with Lawrence’s Introduction and Doughty’s three prefaces, the ...”

“... which in the early 1850s fired the imaginations of the Oxford undergraduates William Morris and Edward Burne Jones. But De Morgan was enrolled at University College, where there was no scope for picturesque medievalism. The spirit of place did not haunt Gower Street. Having failed to get a degree, De Morgan decided to become a painter. He made friends among ...”

“... suggested that Maugham script a film about James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. ‘He said no; there was no love interest in the first Rajah’s life.’ Sylvia Brooke, the wife of the third and last member of the Brooke dynasty, Rajah Vyner, pitched the idea of a film about the first Rajah to Warner Brothers, who summoned her to Hollywood to talk ...”