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“... pictures of his family escape Stallabrass’s everlasting fire. Concurrently with last year’s Turner Prize show at the Tate, Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian artist long resident in this country, showed the works resulting from her year’s residency at the National Gallery. Dark Night of the Soul is a monumental piece, consisting of 19 massive figures ...”

“... is entitled ‘Marriages to Clergymen as a Means of Extending Connection: The Five Daughters of James Tschudi Broadwood’. The Broadwoods were wealthy piano-makers who intermarried with the Lyalls; all five daughters in question did their bit to remove the stigma of trade by surrendering themselves to the clergy (or did they just happen to come across five ...”

“... the Macmillan family, though not quite as rich), and young Anthony (known at this point as James) grew up amid commercial and political affluence. He was sent to Westminster, where he was ‘miserable’, and which is recorded in these pages largely as a venue for scarlet fever and a host for the Air Training Corps. Much is made of Benn’s academic ...”

“... who has been credited with starting the Russo-Japanese war, and the stone-deaf old Etonian James Bourchier, who ‘successfully combined the roles of Times correspondent and founding father of modern Bulgaria’ (he was eventually sacked not for organising Balkan alliances but for being late with his copy and then over-filing). When Heren began his ...”

“... jokes was Punch (which, by the way, was not founded by Thackeray). The jacket of the book features James Gillray’s cauchemar study of a black devil clawing at a vastly swollen big toe. This could stand as a symbol of the 18th century, which saw, as the authors put it, ‘the high noon of gout’. Roy Porter, who teaches at the Wellcome Institute in ...”

“... of the century, according to Phyllis Hembry’s The English Spa 1560-1815, the subscribers to James Marshall’s library in Bath’s Milsom Street included two princes of the blood, five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, four countesses and 43 knights. It is pleasing to imagine John Wesley returning to town and finding all these potentially libertine ...”

“... like that at the Villa Mauresque. The book should have a special piquancy for those familiar with James Lees-Milne’s sparkling volumes about the years he spent flitting round stately homes during and after World War Two, making the most of such high life as was going. The most recent volume is Midway on the Waves; the others, all with titles lifted or ...”

“... writers and artists, but the one that posterity will really value is her interview with ‘Sir James Savile’ for the IoS, on the occasion of his belated knighthood, 22 July 1990. ‘People were terribly shocked when I asked [him] if it was true that he liked little girls … Of course he denied it. But at least by posing the question I’d alerted ...”

“... metallic brocades with which their heraldic costumes were decorated. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ...”

“... In September 2011, the LRB published a Diary by James Lasdun about learning to fire a gun. A few weeks later we received an email from his stalker. It read: ‘His writing is boring and doesn’t sell. Stop publishing that hairy-nosed Jewish wanna-be-Protestant bore of a boar. His wife’s cunt smells of dead rabbits ...”

“... Before the middle decades of the 20th century, when, thanks to the pioneering scholarship of James Lees-Milne and Roy Strong, Larkin’s identity was established and his oeuvre began to be reconstructed, paintings such as those in the Suffolk Collection were often referred to as ‘carpet and curtain pictures’ and attributed, for want of a better ...”

“... desperate, a wild child, a cynical and alarmingly intelligent all-seeing observer. Only in Henry James does one encounter another such riveting portrait of cursed innocence, and Keneally’s Lucy is a more vibrantly warm flesh-and-blood waif than any of the little lost souls in James. Think what you will of the republic ...”

“... pairs of eyes with dotted lines running to sartorial horrors helped to drive home the message. James Thurber was suborned to lend a hand, but his hippo-shaped woman afflicted by ‘gap-osis’ in the midriff looks scarcely the sort to worry about personal grooming or to spend good money on a mechanical contrivance in order to keep her man. Britain was ...”

“... as authoritative, rather than authorised. An authorised biography was to have been written by James Pope-Hennessy, who had gathered much material before he came to his violent end. Hoare received the ‘approval and co-operation’ of the Coward estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how ...”

“... people exist independently of your projections of them, that you get in the superficially similar James Kelman. It’s a bit static and solipsistic. One reason for this might be that Parks writes so much. The going-on-and-on problem – writing stuff that looks like nice prose, but doesn’t really mean much – does tend to happen when you work to ...”