“... series of designs she made for Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with a score by Virgil Thomson, libretto by Gertrude Stein and choreography by Frederick Ashton. Thomson said he chose Stettheimer because her aesthetic was ‘high camp, and high camp is the only thing you can do with a religious subject … The ...”

“... good stuff to come along. In his personal life, in bars or on manly roustabouts with the likes of John Huston and the Rat Pack, Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... company of her most faithful woman friend, a tweedy, kind-hearted dog-lover called Kit Anstruther-Thomson. Ottoline’s arrival was timely and her willingness to be taught seductive. Unfortunately, she had already decided to take a course in political economy and Roman history at Somerville. Wistfully, Paget put in a rival claim, offering a course in ...”

“... Indian teams had to be captained by whites. The most notorious example was the reappointment of John Goddard to lead the tour of England in 1957 over the obviously superior claims of Frank Worrell. This particular anomaly led directly to defeat, and had its share in the disaster at Edgbaston in the first test, when Ramadhin was required to bowl 98 ...”

“... highly profitable paper with a lively staff and, far from least, a model proprietor. Roy (Lord) Thomson was a Canadian businessman who had acquired the Sunday Times from Lord Kemsley in 1959 and the – then unrelated – Times from the Astor family in 1968. His flair for making money was matched by a lack of any political or social ambition, and he ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...”

“... of literary allusion. What are we to make of this homo rusticus who quotes Dr Johnson, uses James Thomson as a model for his rural descriptions, praises Bacon and Locke, refers to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that ...”

“... soon attracted influential support: from the future Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour, from J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron) and from the distinguished physicists Oliver Lodge and Balfour Stewart. Since then the links between scientific heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two books, by Mackenzie and ...”

“... of Susa with France in 1630, ceding English claims to Canada, damaged the interests of Maurice Thomson and his partners (probably the wealthiest partnership in this trade), and caused them, to surrender their profitable Canadian fur business. This brings me to the second large theme not treated. Recent work suggests that one of the more deep-seated causes ...”

“... In one demonstration at the Royal Institution in February 1892 he spelled out the name of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in electric light and made glass vacuum tubes glow as if by magic. Lord Rayleigh, who was to share a Nobel Prize for the discovery of argon, saw in Tesla ‘the genius of a discoverer’, but others weren’t so sure. A.P. Trotter, editor of ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... no longer feel that inaction was a secure moral refuge (an example introduced by Judith Jarvis Thomson). But this suggests that the ‘out’ we allow ourselves when we fail to do all we can to save people who are dying in poor countries is also irrational and self-serving; for we tell ourselves that we are not doing any harm, we are simply failing to ...”

“... continues at an unflagging pace, often getting by without puns and politics. For example, Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career is an exceptionally lively and up-to-the-minute introduction to ‘Shakespeare’s job’. It leans slightly towards the view that his family, and he himself residually, was Catholic, and argues with more certainty ...”