“... I don’t think anyone could have predicted he was going to dominate for the next twenty years and do all the things he would do. It’s not like Tiger Woods or LeBron James, where since they were twelve you knew they were going to be superstars … It’s not so clear-cut in tennis. It takes time to evolve.’ Federer lost ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... up in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and before he was a published writer bought part of a medieval hall house in Blackden, six miles away, with a £510 loan from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for £150. When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s ...”

“... Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. This is a God’s-eye view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and ...”

“... her lack of an education. When she confessed she hadn’t read any of his books, he said they’d go and buy some of them right away. In Pickwick Books on Hollywood Boulevard they asked for anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The clerk said they had none in stock. Fitzgerald asked whether there was any call for them. ‘Oh, once in a while, but not for some ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel Beau-Site was commandeered by the French government and turned into a hospital. This, together with the wartime rent controls imposed on landlords, made the family finances suddenly precarious. The maids, to whom Tippett ...”

“... edition, published in January 1728, sold out in a few weeks. This stir of interest had little to do with Theobald’s reputation as a playwright, which was rather middling: his most recent employment was as a librettist of light operatic pantomimes. Nor was it due to the drawing power of the celebrated Barton Booth, who had been billed to play the lead role ...”

“... candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could. In the theatre: ‘the escape from life, the oblivion of consequences, the holiday … those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”

“... more attention to policing individual behaviour than defending collective social rights. I’d guess that most of Williams’s admirers overlook rather than share her family values, and many probably don’t share her social radicalism either. Leaving aside the Great Betrayal of founding the SDP, Williams was most sharply criticised for two acts: for ...”

“... announces his intentions to remarry, ‘“Why Jean, aren’t you pleased?” Perhaps then I’d say, bravely gulping down the tears and smiling: “Oh yes, Daddy, I’m very pleased, but Daddy, have you forgotten mother so soon?”’ Her anguish is no less desperate for being heightened or sentimentalised. In her stuffy home, crying in public is seen as ...”