“... that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative architect. They provided appropriate settings for Bellini and Botticelli among the tapestries and ...”

“... del secolo scorso.) Like other parties, the British CP in its heyday was disproportionately young. Like them, it lived long enough for the young it recruited at successive historical moments – and with different motivations – to grow older, marry and engender a second generation of Party members, or more likely ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... to co-operate with his biographer. Ramaphosa, an immensely private person, began as a workaholic young lawyer who, after a period of religious and student activism, worked for the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the country’s largest unions, eventually becoming its leader and thus one of the most significant figures in the internal resistance to ...”

“... Babylon as ‘people in a transparent elevator’, or when he flippantly notes that Degas’s young spartans ‘crouch and stretch purely for the benefit of the artist’. Such moments are surprisingly rare. More often one finds oneself in niggling disagreement. For instance, at the apex of Juan Gris’s collage, Breakfast (1914), he discovers ‘a packet ...”

“... got there before he did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages ...”

“... seems to have been a meeting with George Saintsbury in Bath. According to Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett, the pair discussed the ‘sense of fellowship felt by people who had shared a powerful joint experience – whether fighting in war, or membership of a Mason’s lodge, even familiarity with the works of an author such as Austen’. Kipling decided ...”

“... of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In ...”

“... were Lithuanian Jews who settled in the East End and made the familiar move to Hampstead; that the young Goodman’s environment, though far from rich, was civilised, offering good food, good music, much kindness and a tolerance of learning. (These Jewish origins, and a continuing fidelity to the culture, are important, though David Selbourne, as his title ...”

“... from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but ...”

“... reconciled decree,/Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,/Heaven, Hell, Earth, Chaos, all’, in Andrew Marvell’s famous summary. Yet this obsession with origins exists in tense competition with an insistent present: Paradise Lost was decades in the making, but in its final form it broods on the contemporary situation, the failure of the English ...”

“... autobiographical. Things has, so to speak, a joint protagonist in Jérôme and Sylvie, a pair of young market researchers whose story is narrated almost entirely in the third person plural. Obsessed with a colour-supplement fantasy of gracious and fashionable living, Jérôme and Sylvie start out in hope but gradually sink into the mire as the story ...”

“... and dialect and fold on the page; even the wonderful Rose, Green, Red etc Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, on which Angela Carter was brought up, and which she invokes as her model, have their tedious moments, perhaps because the ladies Lang employed to collect and transcribe improved them in the modest fashion of the day, erasing some of the raunchiness ...”

“... off her head. A few Pritchettian genteel-weirdos are to be chanced upon around the margins of young Kingsley’s suburban London childhood, but the general picture of those years is as blurred for us as it evidently is, and maybe was, for him. (And no, we do not get told whose idea it was to call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that ...”

“... of the press corps, were in constant hazard. Julian Manyon of ITN, Angus Roxburgh of BBC TV and Andrew Harding of BBC World Service routinely drove over the (very fluid) front lines. My own former colleague, Steve LeVine – who covers Central Asia and the Caucasus for the Financial Times – survived a shell burst ten yards away: his driver deserted ...”