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“... are the Wrong Notebooks. The same could be said of the Diaries of Emma published in facsimile by Richard Taylor, and containing memoranda of four holidays the Hardys took abroad, starting with their honeymoon. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy read not only the haunting Some Recollections describing her childhood and the Cornish romance with her husband but what ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... was in fact the year when Bernard Shaw (another artist he doesn’t mention) filled the Queen’s Hall with a speech to the National Anti-Vivisection Society in which he outlined the anti-vivisection case that he argued classically and in full eight years later in the Preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma. Mr Turner has in fact recorded not what did happen but ...”

“... of sympathies exchanged in small rooms but – it is not free from the shades of Radclyffe Hall, or Mrs Radcliffe: there are ‘sulphurous fumes’ and ‘exhalations from some obscure depths’ and, at the end, an ill-explained death. There are tantrums and teasings, fret and flurry. Senior girls line the corridor as Mlle Julie leaves for Parisian ...”

“... of her native country.’ By this time she was playing Lady Anne and Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Richard III and Othello. Star quality, however, was not at all what was looked for in those who played opposite a superstar like Kean. She was prized as ‘a decorative utility player’, and as a ‘sweet but ... somewhat passive stage personality’. It must ...”

“... never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like the female hanging that opens Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse ...”

“... out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger-man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When Manchette began ...”

“... Islamism and evangelism make it of particular concern to the authorities; the shoe-bomber Richard Reid used to be a member – so was the convicted terrorist Djamel Beghal from Leicester. It was weeks before senior Markazi figures bothered to deny that Shehzad Tanweer, recruited by Sidique Khan, had worshipped there. Still, the frantic ...”

“... who had trained with Adolf Loos, designed the spartan interior. There was a large lecture hall cum waiting-room, with dark wooden floors, a blackboard and forty chairs; four consulting rooms led off it through soundproofed double doors, and were tastefully furnished with heavy drapes, portraits of Freud and a simple cane couch. One patient was struck ...”

“... who inherited the Shakespearean gifts of his parents, at the age of 11 learning the whole of Richard II by heart in six weeks? Or with Vanessa, the best actor of them all, whom her father called ‘divinely mad’ with a conscience the ‘size of Grand Central Station’? Of these two books on the family Spoto’s is by far the more serious and ...”

“... organisation – the artists must have built platforms to paint the 13-foot-high ceiling of its ‘Hall of the Bulls’ – and hence must point us to a proto-politics, centred around a master of ceremonies. Lewis-Williams’s book bound the neurological and the sociological together into a single argument. His feat was all the smarter for being highly ...”

“... of Tyneside’s dodgy geezer T. Dan Smith can be forgiven on the grounds that his Tammany Hall tsarship coincided with the erection of Gateshead’s Trinity Square Car Park. For Hatherley its screeching decks are ‘one of the most visceral architectural experiences available in Britain, in terms of sheer physical power, architecture that both hits in ...”

“... being unable to recite her lines. She joined Faith, and both were ‘sick and spewing in the lower hall’. Peace entered and ‘most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming’. The same collection also contains a chilling account of what it was like to be told off by Elizabeth I. Harington records the ...”

“... My role involved sitting on a set of steps to one side of the stage in Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me ...”

“... God help me, I had lucky zits – if you see me in the next few years and my face is cratered like Richard Burton’s, you’ll know why. Most important, I had to wear an ugly pair of red velvet shoes that looked like horse hooves, which I had also worn on Election Day in 2012. The vegan leather had crumbled badly since the Obama administration, which must be ...”