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“... Voyage, which is one of the ‘four substantial masterpieces’ printed in full, the others being FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’. (The list has attracted comment: it is clearly polemical, and reviewers who objected to ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ as lightweight ...”

“... like a kind of intoxication. The most important letters are to three new friends, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy came out in 1881, and the mathematician Karl Pearson. With Carpenter she was always on easy terms, he was ‘my dear old Ed’ard’. She does not discuss in her letters, and perhaps never recognised, his ...”

“... which is Britain’s richer, bigger, crasser partner in the Secret Service business. Bloch and Fitzgerald’s book is the logical culmination of the process that began then, and indeed it has a polemical preface by the renegade CIA agent, Philip Agee, who started the thing off, to be followed by other renegades like John Stockwell. Memoirs and exposures by ...”

“... and Lowes Dickinson, he was passionately open to influences, as to the winds that blow. In 1886, Edward Carpenter came on a visit, and ‘after supper we had a delightful walk through the green cornfields in the afterglow. He unfolded to me a wonderful idea of his of a new freemasonry, a comradeship in the life of men which might be based on our little ...”

“... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...”

“... was the kind of woman Sargent painted, and he did paint her. She was thought to have been one of Edward VII’s mistresses. By 1907 Mabel was 50, had spread emotionally and physically, and was known as ‘Ladye’. Ladye’s hot-water-bottles were called Jones and Charlie, and she petted and spoiled them. As John’s first lover, she did duty, too, for the ...”

“... REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN.’ At the end of his authorised biography of Edward Heath, Ziegler writes: ‘He was a great man, but his blemishes, though far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.’ In the case of Mountbatten, we were to understand, it ...”

“... have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and judged accordingly. They treated her as a kind of peg-top ...”

“... suggestions and justify his frequent frenetic trips to knocking-shop and suburban poke-in. It was Edward Albee who observed, in Zoo Story, that when Americans are young they have dirty pictures as a substitute for the real thing, and when they grow up they have the real thing as a substitute for the dirty pictures. This piece of pith is central to Talese’s ...”

“... took a firm moral line and conveyed a message.’ Dyslexia is similarly indulged; ‘Like Scott Fitzgerald, his contemporary, Steinbeck could neither spell nor punctuate.’ When Steinbeck drops out of Stanford, Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among ...”

“... the Civil War, while Europe had to wait for the industrial impetus of the 1914 conflict. As Scott Fitzgerald wisely observed, culture follows money, so by the time he was enjoying the Twenties and dunking Zelda in the Plaza fountain New York was where it was at. Manhattan is not New York, and New York, as people fall asleep telling you, is not America, but ...”

“... great test of all who believe in coincidence, that on 22 November 1963, at the moment when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was being struck by at least one bullet, Desmond FitzGerald was meeting AMLASH in Paris. FitzGerald, the father of the more famous Frances, was a senior exec at the ...”

“... World War One he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the ...”

“... of the Home Rule controversy in 1912-1914. A compilation of the more inflammatory remarks of Sir Edward Carson and his allies, published in Dublin in 1918, achieved the unique distinction of being banned by the British censor in spite of the fact that its quotations were chiefly drawn from speeches by politicians who adorned the War Cabinet. The anonymous ...”

“... England in disgrace. He was subsequently imprisoned and executed for having quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor with his own (something he was almost certainly entitled to do, so long as the arms carried ‘three labels silver’ to distinguish them from those of the heir to the throne). This was taken to imply a treasonable aspiration to the ...”