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“... chatted to the soon to be redundant staff. Others encouraged a yappy terrier to chase a tennis ball across the stretches of empty carpet where the display cases used to be. Most of us did as we had always done and leafed through books and put them down again: men who, perhaps like those in the fetish shop across the street, had deep and almost unreachable ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... sad day for me because there is always the possibility that I shall not be invited to Derby House ball, the grandest collection of people in the world. This year I have not [been]: I am inclined to believe that it is a mistake.’Fancy dress parties became wildly popular in the 1920s. No one enjoyed them more than George V’s eldest son, the future Edward ...”

“... tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining-room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining-room blowing ...”

“... men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it means to think well of themselves – a natural pleasure. From time to time they lament the fact that ...”

“... remotely disconcerts, let alone disturbs. It is instructive to compare it with those films of Douglas Sirk – All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, A Time to Love and a Time to Die etc – that are, apparently, soapy weepies but contain within, because of their rigid adherence to genre conventions, descriptions of the way human beings are cut up to ...”

“... A great solution. But now, he says, things are different. ‘I need my drinky poo. The ball game is over. I don’t want to make more children. I don’t go after women anymore.’ We get into an animated discussion of the relative virtues of the terms ‘whack’ or ‘dust’ for a Mafia hit. Corso finds ‘whack’ an onomatopoeic vulgarity, the ...”

“... Luce, wife of the publisher of Time magazine, later claimed that she had tackled Johnson at the ball following Kennedy’s inauguration. LBJ first told her that Lady Bird was worried about his health and that a quiet spell would suit them both. Mrs Luce (as she told the story) snorted in disbelief: ‘Lyndon, come clean.’ Lyndon leaned closer: ‘Clare ...”

“... of public art – indignant, accusatory, evangelical. The appropriate comparisons are not with Douglas Dunn’s bliss-stained spousal Elegies (1985) or Sharon Olds’s fierce and sceptical The Father (1993); Birthday Letters comes close in tone and in purpose to Auden’s public elegies for Yeats and Freud. In publishing these poems Hughes is addressing ...”

“... prototypical pantomime dame was also a topical skit on a Covent Garden brothel-keeper, ‘Mother Douglas’, whose recent conversion to Methodism provided the kind of ready-made comedy of modern manners on which he thrived. All these were Foote star-turns in plays which he wrote, produced and – in the sketchy 18th-century sense of the word – directed. He ...”

“... in the dark. This routine was interrupted by seasonal festivities, including a grand Hogmanay ball. I watched Archer clumping round the dance floor with the Admiral’s wife. The Admiral, Dalrymple-Hamilton, was a member of a well-known navy family, and was known to Archer, who at some point had served under him at sea, as Dollyrumple-Amilton. While ...”

“... Davis puts it) ‘their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism’s future’. They exhibited as little interest as their fellow exile Brecht in the wartime turmoil in the local aircraft plants or the vibrant night-life and music in the Central Avenue ghetto, and turned their gaze instead onto the little ...”

“... date had been mingling with ‘tailors’, ‘cobblers’ and ‘English shopkeepers’ at a court ball at Laeken. Probably none of this mattered much. Those who had chosen him – Mexican conservatives and Napoleon III – neither expected nor wanted him to show initiative. French generals – the most famous of them was Achille Bazaine, later notorious for ...”

“... This is a disturbing conclusion, given his tendency to make comments like this: I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood. I have ...”

“... newspaper intended for general reading, put it more clearly than that.’ Four years later, James Douglas of the Sunday Express announced that The Well of Loneliness was ‘A Book That Must Be Suppressed’ because ‘its theme is utterly inadmissible in the novel . . . Many things are discussed in scientific textbooks that cannot be decently discussed in a ...”