“... London was rewarded in 1845 with an Act which allowed Jews to hold any municipal office. After the passage of this law, it was clear that only one further political Everest remained to be conquered. The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation ...”

“... makes ‘conscious’ that which was previously ‘unconscious’. There follows a hallucinating passage on the deep structure of the conscious, its ‘two fundamental traits’, the ‘meaning’ of its different kinds of mutton, the dangers of popularising it without understanding and ‘transposing its principles’. Revel’s own theories are equally ...”

“... yow ledeth to the sorweful were/There as the fish in prysoun is al drye’), but Montgomerie’s passage deserves inclusion in any anthology of dying-fish literature. The intricate and attractive stanza (known to the cognoscenti as the ‘Bankis of Helicon’ stanza) probably added to the poem’s popularity, too. Modern readers are divided about ...”

“... and taking her reputation into his hands. They cite as an example Mme d’Epinay and her friend Charles Duclos, the historian and Academician; and indeed some of the best pages in her Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant describe her troubled relationship with Duclos, a genial bully – diagnosed by Sainte-Beuve as a faux bonhomme – and his efforts to ...”

“... from that day in 1955. Gennaro’s being the aboriginal aka of the Groucho Club.) With the passage of time images from the Kray scrapbooks, once seen as the harmlessly boastful trophies of a pair of Proustian parvenus, have been promoted to the status of evidence. The pickings are indeed rich for the analysts of pictorial space, the aesthetes of ...”

“... coming to terms with his mother’s death in her home village, Ravi finally underwent the rite of passage into Brahmin adulthood, which usually happens before the age of twelve: he was now eighteen. He shaved off his hair, learned the mantras, and lived like a monk for a few weeks. Then he travelled to Maihar, where Allauddin Khan was the court musician at ...”

“... most over-exposed recluse, amassed hundreds of hours of telephone recordings. Gottlieb quotes a passage from the tapes to demonstrate how unrevealing they are. (I believe him.)The more decisively Garbo withdrew, the fiercer the static of gossip and rumour generated by her occasional ventures into the outside world. The biographies can filter out much of ...”

“... friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small ...”

“... Matthew’ in the painting of the martyrdom of that saint in S. Luigi dei Francesi), but in the passage just mentioned he is equating the values of Caravaggio with those of the new science, and particularly those of Galileo. Both men were connected with del Monte but the attempt at some ideological link (made also by Robb) is reminiscent of the way art ...”

“... need. So the wealthy Edmund Waller, who wrote panegyrics to Oliver Cromwell and then praised Charles II, is given faintish praise as a refiner of English verse. During his exile in France, Waller lived ‘with great splendour and hospitality; and from time to time amused himself with poetry, in which he sometimes speaks of the rebels, and their ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important ...”

“... written all those plays. At least it looks as if Shakespeare was a healthy outdoor type. ‘The passage in Venus and Adonis which describes a hare running through a flock of sheep to put the hounds off the scent could only have been written by a man who had been hunting.’ This is reminiscent of Duff Cooper’s little book Sergeant Shakespeare, which tries ...”

“... consort, Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by ...”

“... in mythical Brookgate (part of the Huguenot leases), through a bombsite childhood reminiscent of Charles Crichton’s 1947 film, Hue and Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of ...”

“... of inheritance over and above mere nationality and blood-ties, of immediacy irrespective of the passage of time, of idealism almost religious in its fervour. Such writing can never date. Its ramifications – historical, technical, stylistic – can be and have been drawn out at length; it has to be extended to cover epochs unknown to him, or alien, or ...”