“... if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion ...”

“... mirror up to them, in the tawdry and convoluted intrigues of The Jew of Malta, performed at the Rose Theatre in February 1592, a few weeks after his deportation from Flushing. So we have these two spies or projectors, these two Richards or Dicks, and their apparent recollections of Marlowe’s blasphemies. They closely corroborate one another on the ...”

“... a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet the pope, you go,’ Jason tells me. ‘It will make a ...”

“... about them even more than it does about Chaplin. They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant and a way of gaining private ends. At the request of Kaufman and Irving Berlin, the producer of The Cocoanuts, Sam Harris, agreed one day ...”

“... didn’t work for him, and so wouldn’t be covered; researchers and secretaries, like the woman Mark Garnier sent to the sex shop, work for individual MPs, not for Parliament: if they have a complaint, the Equality Act stipulates that it has to be taken up first with their employer, who’s quite possibly the culprit, before they can appeal to an employment ...”

“... Syrie stayed in London, where she was taking a profitable interest in interior design (a reliable mark of bad character in her husband’s later books). They were divorced in 1929: ‘Glad to be rid of her at last,’ Meyers writes, ‘Maugham threw in the chauffeur with the Rolls.’ There were further travels, further books. The world-famous Maugham persona ...”

“... noisily inferior works ‘filled with bombastic rhetoric and “patriotic” excesses’ that ‘mark the nadir of his artistic career’. Such works as Wellington’s Victory and several compositions written for the Congress of Vienna belong to the same period as the revisions to Leonore that resulted in the 1814 Fidelio. Solomon suggests that this ...”

“... It was like comparing electricity with nougat. Not bad for the Prynne side, but missing the mark for Larkin, who might stick in the teeth, but wouldn’t have any truck with confectionery from abroad.After the obituaries, the catalogues: the market adjusts and moves on. Prynne engaged early with economics. ‘The pattern of bond and contract and ...”

“... occupants as simply a provision for his own support & enjoyment!’ The facetious exclamation mark doesn’t even begin to disguise his anxiety about what was going on back home in his presently fatherless family.Only after all these issues have been addressed in detail does Peter get around to what is chiefly on his mind:If, for a time, we stand still or ...”

“... the camp at some point in the summer of 1940: the diligent Mary Felstiner; Foenkinos; Jacqueline Rose in Women in Dark Times (2014); Belinfante in her essay for the Taschen selection; Griselda Pollock in her momentous new study, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. There is no official trace of Salomon or anyone else detained at the time: the camp ...”

“... Whitechapel devised methods of finding their way around. They placed bricks along the pavements to mark their routes through the maze of alleys and back streets around Brick Lane. They created codes for identifying the buses to the West End: the No. 8 was ‘two eggs’, the No. 22 ‘two hooks’. Solidarity was crucial: these Bengalis had all ducked the ...”

“... for the innumerable think-tank experts and ambitious academics and columnists who long to leave a mark on history, Kennan’s telegram remains the model: a set of policy prescriptions perfectly and powerfully in tune with the zeitgeist. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101: he had lived to see the emergence of a whole industry of geopolitical speculation ...”

“... in the summer of 1950 with Hannah Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, and Arendt’s friend Rose Feitelson, improving the English of Origins of Totalitarianism. That book is amazingly fluent and epigrammatic for a German émigré, and one wonders how much work Kazin did. Instead we learn that Kazin had a brief affair with the ...”

“... Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties came out in 1934 – but the 1920s were quicker off the mark. The Roaring Twenties, with James Cagney as its star, branded the decade only nine years after it ended. The Wall Street Crash and the ending of Prohibition, by utterly changing American life, had quickly sealed off the 1920s as history. Subsequent decades ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”