“... about avoiding the extemporaneous or the casual and few were mindful of posterity from such a young age. Nabokov turned his early life into memoir, arranged all his editions with bibliographic punctilio, wiped out most traces of an original, raw, unformed self. Having made the stuff of family history into myth, he vanished into it. Boyd checks the myth ...”

“... acceptance on sufferance by a people who had first made him sign a contract of good behaviour; a young and sickly and insecure heir; large funds earned outside his duchy as mercenary general; a need to compensate for this tough profession and differentiate himself from men like Malatesta down in Rimini; pride in three or four years of genuinely enjoyed ...”

“... but it is not a happy recourse. In ‘San Ildefonso Nocturne’, he returns to his days as a young rebel, when he and his friends took Dostoevsky and Stendhal as their political inspiration:                         Plaza del Zocalo, vast as the heavens:                                 diaphanous ...”

“... a concert, forgets the rest of his life, and ends up staying there for months himself, alone; the young Muñoz Molina was fascinated and envious. The concept of a ‘winter in Florence’ was an early version of the subsequent Winter in Lisbon, just as the soundman was an avatar of Muñoz Molina, or of James Earl Ray; just as a senior Portuguese immigration ...”

“... whom he described as the first ‘good woman’ he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later ...”

“... Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory where young Alfred grew up: the alcoholism, madness and opium addiction. Under this family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment ...”

“... lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest MacDonald, lurched into even deeper disgrace, while Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury were simply not memorable. Clement Attlee, the leader for twenty years and the man who led Labour to the new Jerusalem of 1945, was, in the event, the ...”

“... Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the ...”

“... replacing public funding for orphanages. Not long after £200,000 had been spent in convincing the young London male on his way to the wine bar that philistinism is smart and Saatchi and Saatchi are brilliant, the Director was scanning the budget for £300,000 – the sum needed for redundancy payments which would enable her to get rid of some of the senior ...”

“... in the prison. Of Brian Sharp they declared bluntly: ‘We do not believe him.’ Joyce Lynass, a young mother and church worker, had been a police cadet when the men were brought to Queen’s Road Police Station in 1974. She said in her original evidence at the Court of Appeal that she had seen no assault or ill-treatment of the men in prison. She was then ...”

“... she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to ...”

“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... the police. It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party episode; he was best known for his propaganda film Went the Day Well? (1942). In the role of Frere, Michael Redgrave, who in 1942 had been medically ...”

“... suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”