“... Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could therefore be relied on to be discreet. (It’s unfair to say that Hassall doesn’t tell the ...”

“... eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on ...”

“... Prize. The postwar upsurge in self-portraiture is amply documented in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology of texts and images, The Artist’s Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”

“... to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are ...”

“... sexual assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, John Roberts. Appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts was at one time a reliable Republican. He has been a bit less predictable of late, principally because, as chief justice, he is trying to ensure that the court retains a veneer of respectability. Roberts ...”

“... of what they called ‘Uranian’ love, lacking the word ‘homoerotism’, invented by Ernest Jones in 1916. In more ways than one, women were allocated a special, rather numinous, perhaps terrible place in the Decadent scheme. As Johnson remarked, these people wanted thought to think upon itself, and such subtlety might well invade their life-styles: a ...”

“... There was no such thing as the standard seigneur. Here and there, as Jean Bastier and Peter Jones have shown, the relationship was open to newly harsh economic exploitation, but this was not the norm. Other seigneurs sought to ‘rationalise’ the seigneurial relationship by rescinding community privileges and this was common in the east and south. In ...”

“... distinct as literary criticism, architecture, social anthropology and psychoanalysis. Yet, as John Joseph’s biography shows, Saussure struggled for his entire career to systematise as general theory what he had implicitly understood and put to stunningly successful use at the age of 19: that human language is the prime abstract ‘semiological’ (we ...”

“... his ninetieth birthday, Ferrari hosted a lunch for all his employees. A few months later, Pope John Paul II came to visit him. The papal helicopter landed at the Circuito di Fiorano, Ferrari’s private test track near Maranello, on the morning of 4 June 1988. Twenty thousand Modenese workers were there, from Ferrari and other local firms, even including ...”

“... Every handful of John Updike’s silver has its square coin, its bad penny, its fake. This exquisitely careful writer tends to relax into flamboyance: it is the verbal equivalent of ostentatious tipping. Floating in his air of serene bestowal, the generous author throws his words at anyone who will have them. Keen watchers of such moments will enjoy the introduction to his Collected Poems: ‘In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... one; Bob Andrews was bookish and nerdy (this was who I identified with); and their leader, Jupiter Jones, was smart and mercurial and overweight and bore more than a passing resemblance, it was often remarked, to a young Hitchcock, who made several comic appearances in the novels in the guise of the boys’ reluctant sponsor. Jupiter had entered a competition ...”

“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”