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“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... social group, lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham ...”

“... in Leicester, Manchester and Birmingham. One of the brothers stands prominently at the back of the hall holding a mobile phone. It rings very loudly and the speaker breaks off. The man with the phone walks up and down talking intently in Arabic. Then he shakes his head. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘so much for the great tradition of freedom of speech in this ...”

“... 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 ...”