“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of sangfroid was intended to reassure his companions – while above them on Mount Vesuvius ‘broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points, their bright glare emphasised by the darkness of night.’ Pliny went to bed, and could be heard snoring as the courtyard outside his room filled with volcanic ash. The others woke him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Near-East. They talk about Hittite Kings and the Citizens of Ur. From the window one can see broad-roofed Huguenot weaving-lofts outlined against Hawksmoor’s church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who never puffed, thought Stewart in The Shop around the Corner ‘a young American with as broad and unaffected a base in a country’s experience as Huck Finn’. It has been the way of critics, and the habit on the whole of audiences, too, to take Stewart as something the native climate effortlessly produced. But Stewart for his part never cared for ...”

“... get there? Where’s the transition? Salter jumps the gap from one kind of time to another, from broad narrative time to tight episodic time, without a safety net, trusting the reader to follow him. Over the pages of sharp, clever dialogue between Viri and the shirtmaker that follow we learn about Viri’s vanity, his limited means, his wit, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen deals. They hesitated to invite the novelist William Gaddis because none of them could get through his mammoth novels. They relented, Friedman tells us in his memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they ...”