“... is merely salacious innuendo: it is titillating but not informative. The only real plum is Cecil Beaton’s remarkable comment on Lily Elsie’s anaemia – ‘this was no doubt the reason for an unusually early menopause and for a certain frigidity’ – which should be a winner for the Guardian’s ‘Naked Ape’ column. Nor do the revelations on ...”

“... which we have imposed on the period, or by starting to explore its differential codings. Hugh Cunningham demonstrates very effectively that the identification of the Conservative Party with patriotism was never as unproblematic and as beneficial as many have assumed. Promoted by a faction, patriotism became associated with particular policies, and ...”

“... art and high fashion were most closely in step with each other, Cunard – photographed by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Curtis Moffat, Cartier-Bresson, John Banting and others – was one of the figures in whom they converged. Gucci’s ‘Hard Deco’ line for Spring 2012 was launched in homage to ‘Louise Brooks and Nancy Cunard’. This edition of her ...”

“... like a Radical-Socialist mayor of a French industrial town. He might be “un bon papa”.’ Of Cecil King (proprietor) and Hugh Cudlipp (editor) of the Daily Mirror: ‘They are as good a pair of ruffians as you could find anywhere.’ Of Averell Harriman: ‘As in England, multi-millionaires have no chance in politics ...”

“... flight deck, killing 13 men, among them a young Naval lieutenant named David Tinker. His father, Hugh Tinker, has collected and edited David’s letters home. He has done so not just to make a memorial to his son, but to let a dead man testify: for both father and son came to believe that this was an unjust war fought only to save the careers of ...”

“... relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish appearance’), and the youngest MP in the House. He was ...”

“... they were burdens on the motherland and impediments to free trade. But by the end of the century Cecil Rhodes’s view that imperial expansion was a ‘bread and butter question’ for the nation dominated official and public discourse. Blunt saw that the connection between nation and empire wasn’t merely material. The idea of empire had been invested with ...”

“... Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the Cape in sombre spirits and travelled north to cultivate a useful sense of grievance. Yet in following this beaten track Jacobson implies a ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... to avert.’ This comes from Johnston’s charming memoir of the art historians John Fleming and Hugh Honour, published last year.* They too were part of the Lubbock household; their own memory of Origo’s visits was summed up in a sentence: ‘Then this icicle appeared and the whole house pulled itself together.’ Thirty years after her death, the gardens ...”

“... keep fizzing even as Epictetus sedates. Above all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the ...”

“... New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I ...”

“... and was, in any case, mean. He was prepared to give them nothing. ‘The three stepchildren of Hugh D. Auchincloss,’ Vidal wrote, ‘Jackie, Lee and I, were brought up in a wealthy manner and yet were penniless, unlike the gentleman’s five official children. Of necessity, Jackie married twice for money, with splendid results. Lee married twice far less ...”

“... that the book’s warm reception was almost unanimous. One noisily dissenting voice was that of Hugh Kenner and part of his objection was similar to Empson’s. ‘What he asserts is so,’ Kenner says of Ellmann’s book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out ...”

“... frequent mutilation: a memorial that was reviled long before anyone thought to take a hammer to Cecil Rhodes.From events like these, a general picture can be constructed of poor Scots driven overseas (the Sutherland evictees eventually left the country) by a combination of ruthless landlordism and what Devine characterises as ‘the brazen subordination of ...”