“... company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting that they might do better to walk along the platform to the restaurant car. Jeffrey Archer ...”

“... with sending a series of obscene letters, mostly addressed to her neighbours Violet and George May. Here is an extract from a letter dated 14 September 1921: ‘You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor.’ The Mays were sent ...”

“... to mature in the British intelligence community. In a letter circulated to all chief constables in May 1934, MI5’s director general, Vernon Kell, explained that fascism was, to a great extent, ‘a natural reaction from communism’. This thesis, if something so underdeveloped can be called that, was widely shared in Whitehall. When Hugh Trevor-Roper joined ...”

“... who held a social rank and position higher than it really was. This, in the England of 1895, may almost have been seen as a more serious accusation. But Wilde came from a long tradition of Irishmen who had created themselves in London. He was an artist, he moved freely in society, often using an English accent. He had been to Oxford. He invented himself ...”

“... call him an artist. This suggestion, under the rapid wit of the dialogue and the scene shifts, may have done most to compel the admiration of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture ...”

“... we have to conclude that in many men and women this amounts to a definite choice. The choice may exist on an unconscious level, but nevertheless it is still there. Why some people but not others are obsessed with the survival of their species is a fascinating question. I would suggest that it may be that, in times like ...”

“... universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.’ These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the Continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age: ‘governance beyond the ...”

“... real luxuries, offered only to a select and well-paid few, were priced absurdly low.) Prokofiev may later have regretted this decision: good apartments were in very short supply in Moscow, and he never got one he really liked. Now came the challenge of becoming a Soviet composer. Apolitical as he was, Prokofiev nevertheless seems genuinely to have welcomed ...”

“... argue – The Everlasting Man is more conciliatory, and more elementary. Chesterton thinks he may have taken his imitation of innocence too far, exaggerating ‘even my own ignorance’ in the process. In the earlier book he just fills the world with straw men and waits for them to fall down. If the intellectual world of his day is a madhouse, as he ...”

“... who is capable of leaving a page blank. ‘His readiness to become involved in slave management may have been a sign of personal desperation; it is still shocking, and contradicts the ideology implicit and explicit in much of his poetry.’ Crawford’s book sets out to assemble what he calls ‘a credible portrait’, not a character reconstructed like one ...”

“... The real reason Munthe left Paris at the end of 1887, Jangfeldt says, was his divorce. This may come as a surprise to readers of The Story of San Michele, who aren’t given any reason to suppose he was ever married. Ultima Hornberg, like Munthe the child of a Swedish chemist, was a 19-year-old art student when she met Munthe in Paris in the summer of ...”

“... as famous for her Falstaffs and Prosperos as for the heroines she played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid ...”

“... knowingly archival Victorianism (she has used the phrase ‘self-conscious realism’). This may involve not only telling characters what they don’t know, but how they don’t think. A little later in The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ‘knew little about Thomas ...”

“... dominant version, liberalism – sets about applying morality to politics. In what future writers may come to think of as the palmy days of political moralism, theorists have tried to imagine what politics would be like if it were redesigned according to a moral prospectus. It is not usually thought that actually existing politics shadows moral norms very ...”

“... criticism of Israel is excessive, the earlier adulation was, and that an answer to present woes may be found in the history of Zionism, including the period just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the ...”