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“... is visiting Long Beach,’ she declared, urging the manager to hold a reception for King at City Hall. He refused: ‘He’s a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political ...”

“... and even 19th-century Britons celebrated a range of patriotic anniversaries, most of them to do with resistance to Roman Catholicism. And even when the memory of these wore thin, there were so many other powerful cements. Insular geography, overwhelming Protestantism, and a cult of Parliament kept the three parts of Great Britain together, as did an ...”

“... to the same English classes as Rania said, ‘and she gave off a sort of spirit of blessing. You’d leave the party saying: “I want to be a bit more like Rania, and act that way.”’She said she would happily have a dozen children. She found it easy. She was incredibly relaxed with her two, letting them paint their faces and daub the bedroom cupboards ...”

“... that usually disappoints. The ability to manipulate a formula rarely overlaps with the ability to do without one. Hensher is confident enough of his handling to put the thriller plot on hold for 150 pages in the middle of the book, before picking it up again in a darker key. The genre stabilisers are taken off the bicycle – and it glides off again with ...”

“... and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the material is that of public ...”

“... similar precautions, this would be a damning indictment of the Soviet system. On the other hand, Dr Georgi Arbatov deserved to be listened to when he told Radio 4 listeners that the dangers from panic were real. Is the British nuclear industry unnecessarily secretive? Do they hide information which they ought not to ...”

“... and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found the war experiences described in One of Ours in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. After her literary success, Willa Cather led a secure, lofty, comfortable, solidly middle-class life. But it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and ...”

“... from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? – strikes a deflationary note familiar enough from recent television interviews. It had a lot to do with the fact that in September 1400 the historical Glyn Dŵr had proclaimed himself Prince of Wales. Some ...”

“... among people. Sennett believes that artistic performance – in the theatre, at the concert hall – can be our guide. No convincing actor or musician can treat her performance as the occasion to reveal her inner thoughts and feelings. That isn’t what the play or the music is about – we come to hear what Shakespeare or Stravinsky wrote, not to find ...”

“... all the more rapidly since she had advertised her arrival by sending on ahead her portrait of David Garrick. Yet the London which threw itself at her feet two years after Hogarth’s death was still recognisably Hogarth’s town, a mixture of polish and jagged edges in which high taste and low life mingled uneasily. Kauffman’s reputation quivered a ...”

“... is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th ...”

“... of eminent Victorians was handing out a bouquet to the most eminently Victorian of them all. He’d been hooked ever since he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the ...”

“... such as Komisarjevsky, Michel Saint-Denis (more fully treated by Croall), Peter Brook and Peter Hall. They are, of course, purely theatrical. Gielgud had an abnormally long theatrical life, appearing in or directing a great many plays in a great many places and also making dozens of movies, so his biographers have felt obliged to be long in their turn. They ...”

“... rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”