“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... real books to his name and selections of work in the two most influential anthologies of the time, Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse and Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Eliot was a sincere admirer and generous patron; Yeats was delighted with Barker’s ‘lovely subtle mind and a rhythmic invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins’. What ...”

“... back to front. They shared his concern about decadence but countered that he had enlisted as its foot soldier in wanting to make art into decoration by purging it of content. The art world was now finding him almost impossible to swallow. In 1966, the artist John Latham borrowed Art and Culture from the St Martin’s School of Art library and enjoined his ...”

“... the former screenwriter Dori Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of ...”

“... humour was born in the trenches. Oscar Wilde’s clever formulations no longer sufficed. The five-foot-two eyes-of-blue Charleston danced by the ‘It’ generation required a leg position as awkward as the knock-kneed pose of Nijinsky’s corps de ballet. The madcap crazes of the 1920s, the frenetic club culture and the incidence of social deviance were a ...”

“... engine full of power, magically harnessed, subject to the faintest pressure from the ball of your foot. The power of ninety horses – think of that! Suppose you had had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping round the side of a mountain, wouldn’t that make your pulses jump? And this magic ribbon of concrete laid ...”

“... in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL ...”

“... for the Times, was now teaching at the school. By the time he arrived, Frank and his friend M.R.D. Foot – later New College and SOE – had already read McLachlan’s reports of the Reichstag trial, with Dimitrov at centre stage. (Conradi observes drily that the eloquent figure in the dock in Leipzig would subsequently play an important role in Frank’s ...”

“... in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry plantations, a ...”

“... Bacon and the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, who knew Philadelphia well and explored it on foot. But when Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was ...”

“... him. In the reminiscences of his friends, he figured as absent-minded, cuddly (he was only five foot – podgy, bespectacled), shy, impractical, lovable. The story of his ‘Unfinished’ symphony came to symbolise the tragedy of his unfinished life (he wrote two movements and put them in a drawer, later giving the manuscript to his friend Josef ...”

“... came out, his face and body gleaming, he found Elizabeth had made the bed and was sitting at the foot of it. Only after he took from his side of the built-in wardrobe a pair of underpants and put them on did he feel he could go to Elizabeth, lean over and kiss her lips. She stared at him when he stepped back. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m no doubt ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... of homosexuality in 1967 had opened up new possibilities, but the thaw was gradual. Michael Holroyd’s great biography of Lytton Strachey, published that year, was prophetic of an unembarrassed candour about gay lives, rather than a response to new freedoms; P.N. Furbank’s Life of Forster was still two years in the future, and other ...”

“... of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a travelling pedlar in medieval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles, showed a canny sense of the capaciousness of kitsch. But the social unease produced by a conscious display of bad taste wasn’t at all the point for Koons, who, in Warholian fashion, insisted on the sincerity of his ...”