“... has him mingling a few moments of scary, personal invention with lots of expansive coasting – broad, theatrical gestures towards the idea of a personality. But in the conversation he was working, and thinking. Coppola says, ‘The man is mad, Marlon, I mean his madness is our madness,’ to which Brando replies: I don’t think that he’s like Patton. I ...”

“... Is it opposed to a profound appearance? And is the writer contrasting narrow conventions with broad or loose ones? Douglas Cooper, in similar vein, tells us that the concern of Cubism was ‘the solid, tangible reality of things’, while John Golding, in a standard work on the subject, defines it as ‘the fusion of various views of a figure or an object ...”

“... with the preponderance of any particular metal. Nevertheless it is easy to see that there is a broad homology between the five successive forms of government, the four types of metal supposedly found within the souls of various social groups, and the threefold division of the individual soul into its rational, spirited and appetitive components. The ideal ...”

“... open-necked blue shirt – the anthropologist Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne, Stephen Spender and Sir William Walton. Conversely, almost all the women pictured in the book expose neck dimples, if not deep décolletage. Those who do not, whether the Duchess of Windsor in a triple-pearl choker, Dorothy Sayers in a mannish coat and tie or Margaret Thatcher in high ...”

“... a taste seemingly guided by Gill and Epstein (not that he ever writes about them), he values a broad flat plane which has been incised with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver ...”

“... five squadrons to establish airfields in the land between the hills of the Asiago plateau and the broad valley of the Piave, and several airmen were also interred there. We were looking for the grave of a particular British pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation ...”

“... carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged spectator. Now grander plans are afoot and we have the block ...”

“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When he was examined, he showed very little concern, and appeared easy and cheerful . . . The boy was found guilty and sentenced to death; but he was respited from time to time on ...”

“... explains the Scottish Protestant world-view: all the heroic fighters for Scottish independence – William Wallace, Bonnie Prince Charlie – are Catholic, and thus intolerable. You had to go with the queen and the redcoats. ‘So it was the English, that was who ye were if ye were Scottish,’ Kieron concludes. Fraternisation is possible. Kieron has Catholic ...”

“... of MOOCs. Or so many of his later readers argued, as they stabbed his book with their bent nibs. William Warburton, who saw hieroglyphs as a primitive rather than profound form of writing, found it ‘pleasant’ to watch Kircher ‘labouring through half a dozen folios with the writings of late Greek Platonists, and the forged books of Hermes, which contain ...”

“... class-deformed reality.By then, he had spent many decades at his desk with his trusty editions of William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769) and the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages (1746). Writing, for him, was all about ‘flow’, which was partly a matter of steady production – at his peak he could manage several ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568 contains six poems that are his, or have been ascribed to him. But William Ringler has pointed out that five of these poems are later additions to the manuscript, and the sixth is ascribed, apparently in a later hand, simply to ‘Montgomery’ – a sufficiently common name, and the attributions in this manuscript are in any ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”