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“... magazine Alpha publishes estimates of top individual earnings. The 2007 list was headed by John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who earned $3.7 billion by betting that the value of securities backed by US sub-prime mortgages would collapse. He was followed by George Soros ($2.9 billion) and James Simons ($2.8 billion). These are figures far beyond even the ...”

“... is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just writers at work on our ...”

“... prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the time, and Robert Mackenzie much later, stressed. MacDonald had the charisma, he had the contacts with the Left, and he profited from the general disenchantment with the war and those associated with it. That said, it is impossible to see the worthy Clynes as a ‘lost ...”

“... work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-pool. The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ...”

“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”

“... with churning desire. One double-click of a computer mouse, and you’re on Canada’s cascading Mackenzie River, or New Zealand’s winding Hope River, or the deep aquamarine pools of the Big Blackfoot River in Montana. The sensational locations vary, but the thrill remains the same. The piquant tension of the pick-up. (‘C’mon, baby.’) Then, the ...”

“... John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5 ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s ...”

“... or simply fell to pieces is unknown. The first record of it is in 1797, when Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General of India, visited the site and describe ‘a great low mound, the upper part of which rose in a turreted shape to the height of twenty feet’, with a diameter at the top of about thirty yards. By the mid-1790s the stupa had sunk ...”

“... captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader Peta Nocona and the mother of Quanah ...”

“... accomplished Ottawa hostess’ with a house in Ottawa and a summer home next to that of Premier Mackenzie King. She graduated to the company of the rogues and rascals from a life typified by lunch with Mrs Barrington Ward, wife of the Times editor (Mrs Ward ‘in a dark reddish dress with fully pleated collar, looking what the word charming means’), a ...”

“... the drawing room – and sat me by a different fireplace and an old but different desk – was John Macfie, a tall and whiskery gentleman who lives there with his family. He poured me a whisky before sitting down in a red armchair beside the darkened windows. ‘At the front, in Louis’s bedroom, you get the punctuation of street noise,’ he ...”

“... in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious idea, would doubtless have been pleased by the thought of a thousand-page doorstopper devoted to his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”