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“... too dangerous to proceed, and shelves it. Instead, he agrees to a catastrophic deal, brokered by John Prescott, which commits him to handing over to Brown before the end of his second term, on the condition that Brown gives him his full support in the interim. As even Blair acknowledges, this was a terrible mistake. The agreement made no sense, because its ...”

“... as that of light. British natural philosophers, led by the prodigious Glasgow professor William Thomson, liked this kind of model, because they reckoned dynamical machinery was uniquely comprehensible and informative. Trained to think in terms of the physics of gyroscopes, pulleys, pumps, calf’s-foot jelly or rubber bands, they extended this behaviour to ...”

“... them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the spring of 1985, paid £10 million for a minority stake in the Telegraph Group, and later ...”

“... then who is left to man the supposedly overbearing metropolis, unless it is Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman? The ramparts so frailly manned should have given way long ago to the armies massed against them. What Crawford doesn’t realise is that this indeed has happened; he is sounding the bugle for an assault on a fortress that surrendered years ago. The ...”

“... when cultural imperialism among publishers seems to have demanded the exclusion of Gaelic verse. John MacQueen and Tom Scott, who edited the 1966 Oxford anthology, were aware of the lack of Gaelic and squirm a bit in their Introduction. When Penguin had Tom Scott edit their Scottish anthology (published in 1970) again there was no Gaelic. Recently, Penguin ...”

“... an admission that the quest might be disastrous. So it only seems to be a story about Scottie, or John Ferguson (‘Scottie’ is a curious name, like that of a small dog). Scottie is a police detective until, unmanned by vertigo, he allows a fellow cop to fall to his death in the course of a rooftop chase in San Francisco. Did the police force not know about ...”

“... to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed ...”

“... family of these witnesses; we never hear the voice of an interviewer. One of the most beguiling is John Musgrave, a Marine so badly wounded in Vietnam that several doctors rated him ‘expected’. He became a drop-out and an alcoholic, a would-be suicide and a protester who is still battling the melodrama of the war and the effects of his wounds. He is now a ...”

“... what happened to Star Wars. Star Wars, along with Jaws, is regularly cited, not least by David Thomson, as the film that ‘killed the movies’. Glenn Kelly’s answer, in his introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of ‘Star Wars’ (Allison and Busby, £9.99), is: ‘Get over it, Dad.’ This selective quotation ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... often.’ Margery Dayrell worried that her son Nathaniel could not sleep, though he was drowsy. John Windmill complained that he ‘cannot sleepe nor take any rest on his bed or up or Downe’. Hugh Thomson feared that his son, ‘who he supposeth to be taken or planet stroken’, had been unable to sleep the previous ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... as orders for ‘the next Górecki’ were heard in the boardrooms, the ever-striking figure of John Tavener emerged once again from his meditations, and the ‘buy British’ campaigners set to work. His Apocalypse was yet to come; and when it did (in August at the Albert Hall), Union Jacks were unfurled in the national press, while recollections of the ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... series of designs she made for Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with a score by Virgil Thomson, libretto by Gertrude Stein and choreography by Frederick Ashton. Thomson said he chose Stettheimer because her aesthetic was ‘high camp, and high camp is the only thing you can do with a religious subject … The ...”