“... as a performer. His faith in her is apparent in everything, from the humour of her scenes with Margaret O’Brien as her younger sister, Tootie, to the trolley scene, which has a rare interiority for an MGM song-and-dance scene as well as the usual Technicolor surface charm. Through Minnelli’s direction, we seem to be both inside and outside Garland’s ...”

“... Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy ...”

“... or a question of interpretation, or a misleading claim, but a lie. It ignores the rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated. When you factor that in, the EU actually ‘takes’ about £250 million a week from Britain. Deepening the dishonesty of the original lie, even that figure overstates Britain’s contribution by more than half, because the EU gives ...”

“... have been better if he didn’t. One bit of learned advice to the British reader: if you hear Margaret Thatcher or her successor Big Benn speaking in the Commons on the state of the box-office in the West End, you’d better brace yourself because an English version of Dr Goebbels is surely limping his way down Whitehall – to take care of the Ministry ...”

“... quotations: The Ingoldsby Legends, Canon Twells and Captain Newton, Blake, Cowley, Pope, Edgar Allen Poe succeeding one another, without any straining for effect. At the funeral of a brother-in-law some months later, Herbert and Raleigh – in opposite registers, disinflationary and grandiloquent – come to mind with equally natural ease. The erudition ...”