“... the hefty Wasp Master that he took to wearing on the same finger the topaz ring James had worn for John Singer Sargent’s 1913 portrait. Despite this, Edel was willing to play both sides of the scrimmage over the writer’s reputation. In the 1950s, when the prominent collector (and friend of Edel’s) Clifton Waller Barrett won a bidding war over James’s ...”

“... his fictional texture. Fantasy is a hard discipline that rewards attention to detail. The critic Guy Davenport, a student of Tolkien’s, learned very little of the morphology and syntax of Old English from him; Tolkien wasn’t helped by his speech impediment and inability to keep to the point. But in a later conversation with Allen Barnett, who had been an ...”

“... the end of his second term as President it frequently was. She also played tough girl to his nice guy. Reagan desperately needed to be liked both by the voters and by those around him – a formidable weakness for a politician. I suspect that at least some of Nancy’s rudeness, bullying and nagging campaigns to get rid of people was a case of her doing what ...”

“... girl – it was just the inconvenience that bothered him. In that sense he was a pretty selfish guy. This story sums up in a few lines all the major themes of Nigel Hamilton’s book – the over-whelming shadow of Joe Kennedy, Jacks’s unrelenting promiscuity, indeed his virtually psychopathic drive for sexual satisfaction, and the coldness and ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... we move into a different period and a changed political climate. Muir was picked on as fall guy by the political establishment in the scare over the radical movement of 1792-4. He was a young advocate out on a limb, for his family background was not landowning. He was overconfident, indiscreet, and for a lawyer surprisingly unaware of the current ...”

“... the shawl. Snow stops work on the tarpaulin, the lay figure is out in the yard sitting ‘like a Guy’. Rossetti has borrowed his great coat and a pair of breeches, but at least some work is being done indoors: ‘Now the pattern [of the shawl] is all drawn and covered with a tint I put in the out door effect. To have painted it all out of doors would have ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special ...”

“... emails, is strikingly similar to the message dropped through the letterboxes of Pepys Road in John Lanchester’s novel Capital – ‘We Want What You Have’.) Lasdun’s parents were Jews who converted to the C of E, and Nasreen’s communications quickly became virulently anti-semitic: ‘Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?’; ‘I ...”

“... the significance of background details such as the Reformation, the abdication crisis and Guy Fawkes night. Her tone is that of an anthropologist who has spotted an unknown tribe from a great distance. When stumped she reaches for a comparison with Downton Abbey. Like Penny Junor, she has written other royal biographies (of the queen and Princess ...”

“... There are brilliant re-creations of Lenny Bruce’s edgy stand-up routines. He is ‘a handsome guy’ who ‘resembled a poolshark who’d graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes’, and Bruce’s repeated reminder, offered during the Cuban missile crisis, that ‘We’re all gonna die’, is said to give the comedian and his audience a spooky and ...”

“... compelled to ‘light out’ for a more private struggle. Above all, the tradition of the ‘tough guy’ has been central to the sense of what made people different in America, ever since the English Captain John Smith began exploring the rivers of Virginia and got captured by the Indians. These are symptoms, not of a ...”

“... scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case ...”

“... something else is going on. James is discussing what he calls the ‘marvellous outpourings’ of John Addington Symonds – two years later, thinking of Symonds in connection with the trial of Oscar Wilde, James calls them ‘fond outpourings’ – which constitute a privately printed pamphlet on love between men. ‘The exhibition is infinitely ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”