“... scientist: between 1982 and 1996 Matthew Noble’s bust occupied a place of honour in the entrance hall at Number Ten. His stock has risen slowly and steadily; compare this with the Nasdaq-esque slumps and booms of Darwin’s posthumous standing. Like Darwin, coaxing, flattering, prodding, Faraday knew how to fashion networks of correspondence, how to maintain ...”

“... identified as the tragedian Elisa Rachel, whom Charlotte Brontë had seen in London in 1851. Sarah Bernhardt may be better known today, but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and ...”

“... journalist started after college in Pittsburgh. From its theatres, opera house and concert hall, she sent sharp, highly critical reviews to Nebraska papers. She formed a new attachment to Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a Pittsburgh judge in whose house she resided during the next five years while she taught English to high-school ...”

“... What makes it special, apart from the preternaturally large looming of the Living Word Gospel Hall, is its hidden opal wealth. Four years before the week that constitutes the foreground of the story, a charismatic stranger has walked into town, clad in loose white garments and carrying a rifle. He has curls, a beard, intense and disturbing milky-blue eyes ...”

“... with a cosier domestic appeal shows the one-time home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, now the ‘council house’ seat of Robert Maxwell, lit up by rockets at night, with a huge illuminated sign saying ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ suspended from a tall tree. Perhaps because the picture does not show the full dimensions of ...”

“... called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to understand and appreciate the book if you know what went into it. She’s not thinking about all the social and intellectual ferment of Fitzgerald’s early life that made him the man and ...”

“... and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox News. The fate of these ...”

“... attended a prep school called Dumbrells, where a ‘large, crucified bat’ hung in the entrance hall. This appears to have set the tone of the establishment, which was by all accounts spartan in its accommodation and draconian in its discipline. ‘It was decreed,’ one contemporary of Camilla’s recalls, ‘that any possession found lying about must then ...”

“... filled the area behind what is now St Peter’s Square with grand buildings such as the Free Trade Hall (now a hotel) and Manchester Central railway station (now a conference centre). Leigh’s set designers therefore built early 19th-century Manchester in an Elizabethan fort on the Thames. The post-production editor was busy on his laptop erasing the ...”

“... it’s the power ‘of men, men in a group, men in their certainty, men on a street corner or in a hall. It is like a voodoo.’ She finds freedom from that male voodoo in the underworld of gambling, where class and sex count for very little. Guilty about her unearned fortune, she’s more excited by losing than by winning: but the real pull is that she feels ...”

“... a record $728,000 and shipped out to California, where it hangs alongside Lawrence’s portrait of Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, known as ‘Pinkie’ (and best avoided on a full stomach). Blue Boy was painted sometime around 1770, when Gainsborough was living in Bath. For many years, the sitter was identified as Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ...”

“... by warders and barbed wire, and a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier. In the entrance hall, rows of prosthetic eyeballs are fixed to the wall. The agents opened the door with a crowbar and, according to federal prosecutors who spoke to the New York Times, ‘seized photographs of nude underage girls’. Evidence has been piling up that Epstein was ...”

“... you’re no Jack Kennedy.’ In 1992, the experimental (and subsequently retained) ‘town hall meeting’ format was used for one of the three 1992 debates. Bill Clinton’s team mapped their candidate’s optimal trajectories across the open arena, in order to maximise the number of times George Bush would be in shot behind him. Bush, uncomfortable ...”

“... are making these economies should make it possible to enforce a stricter regime in the Servants’ Hall. How different from the home life of Tony and Cherie. An editorial interpolation from Soames makes it clear that these plans were ignored, and the impossibly ascetic cigar-limit of four a day was never seriously attempted. Indeed, a letter from a few years ...”

“... page, and mistranscribes the sources, like Todd, which it pillages. Spender refers to errors in Sarah Fielding’s memorial tablet as ‘symptomatic of the “mistakes” in the documentation of women’s lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ...”