“... and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid ...”

“... couldn’t be sure, you could only surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and ...”

“... is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle ...”

“... and his fellow ‘Lunar Men’: the select club of Midlanders that included Joseph Priestley, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. But many of Wedgwood’s more radical ideals were in direct conflict with the needs of his business, which involved putting expensive, intricate ornamental vases on royal and aristocratic tables to stimulate emulative demand among ...”

“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”

“... seen by a mouse from its corner, and in 1898, going to Gladstone’s lying in state in Westminster Hall, he observes the ‘plain oak coffin’ and records an overheard remark: ‘Two carpenters in front of me said “a rough job – ¾ panels, & l½ framing”.’ It is hard to think of any other writer who would have foregrounded the workmen in quite that ...”

“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”

“... of age: in a recent election, Harry Brit, Milk’s successor as the gay representative at City Hall, was defeated by a woman candidate, Norma Polisario, because for the first time since Milk’s campaign in the Seventies the gay and lesbian communities had ceased to vote en bloc. Homosexuality there is returning to where it belongs in civil society – not ...”

“... of 1877, he spotted a potential model, Margaret Benson, at a concert rehearsal in the Albert Hall and arranged for an introduction. ‘She has often been called my “Burne-Jones daughter”,’ the obliging Mrs Benson told him. Though the critics were generally appreciative when The Golden Stairs was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, they ...”

“... the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the mirrors. What​ explains ...”

“... For instance, the friar describes the great Silver Tree of Caracorum, which stood in the reception hall of the royal palace. Four gilded serpents twined around its trunk; four silver lions sat by its base. When the khan wished to pour drinks for his guests, a mechanical angel in the crown sounded a trumpet and caused the lions to dispense fountains of ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military ...”

“... P.143. First three lines. P.183. Third, fourth and fifth lines.’ Break off to hum a few music-hall hits: ‘Par’ ought to know’; ‘When there isn’t a girl about, you do feel lonely.’ Scramble your commentary with polyglot puns and in clashing literary registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to ...”

“... by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured sceptic, who enjoyed Rousseau’s company, and was not unduly put out by his suspicious and ...”

“... sure that much of Layard’s admiration for Piero, like that expressed a few years before by James Dennistoun in his Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, had been inspired by Eastlake. But Layard was particularly attracted by the fact that Piero was chiefly a mural painter. Unlike Eastlake, Layard was not at this point a collector of paintings, and his visits ...”