“... to his son John, 18 months younger: I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried ...”

“... views on foreign policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of ...”

“... river in Antony near Paris, where they ran a business repairing antique tapestries – at a young age Louise assisted with the drawing. As small children Louise and Pierre were inseparable, and wrote to each other fondly when they were parted. But Pierre lagged well behind Louise at school, and never fully found his way. We know little about his ...”

“... Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ‘preferred intermammary intercourse – making love between a woman’s breasts ...”

“... funeral and to do all he could for the mother and stepfather of B, whom he regarded as a promising young artist and the most lively and intelligent boy he knew. I gathered that some of B’s school friends, when they were ‘high’ on ‘mushrooms’ (fungi which schoolchildren find growing all over the place in large quantities), had gone into the Tube at ...”

“... Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual desire. He is on the search for a lost late Giovanni Bellini (Gentile’s more famous brother). This genre of fiction depends on imagining almost possible pictures, and you ...”

“... from him. In 1739 she left England for Italy, hoping that her love for Francesco Algarotti, a young Italian, would result in a long and comfortable liaison. But her lover proved cold, and Lady Mary was left to enjoy Italy by herself. She never totally broke with her husband, and they maintained the fiction that she was travelling abroad for her ...”

“... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes. Sometimes, in his little exercise books, he might draw ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... partying which has informed ‘standard accounts’ of the so-called Jazz Age, crammed with bright young things enjoying a hop and a skip before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His suggestion is that the times were more political: less cocaine, more coal-face; less hangover, more pit-closure. The defining moment, he argues, was not the Crash, but the General ...”

“... acted as a zealous servant of the Germans: he connived, for instance, in the transportation of young French men and women to forced labour beyond the Rhine. On the other hand, his homosexuality is judged less severely nowadays than was the case forty years ago. A comic note is struck by Bonnard’s typically French obsession with the proper conduct of ...”

“... As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall ...”