“... weren’t interested in ‘causes’. But Hecht has found his cause. His introduction came via Peter Bergson, the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who had come to America from Lithuania by way of Palestine. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Kook formed a series of organisations to continue his work, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and ...”

“... an appendix. Where Forster praises Dickens’s ‘unbroken continuity of kindly impulse’, Wilkie Collins wrote in the margins of his copy: ‘Wretched English claptrap.’ Forster’s discretion ensured that he wouldn’t be the definitive biographer, even if no writer would ever know as much about Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now ...”

“... hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children,’ Major remarks in My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, ‘the talent to entertain was not among them,’ which must be one of the ...”

“... English Charlemagne?’, can be usefully juxtaposed with the papers of Wormald and Peter Sawyer). The book ends, fittingly, with Eric John’s evocation of the world of Abbot Aelfric, a scholar of the late Anglo-Saxon era. Fittingly, because that world already contained the seeds of its own dissolution, in the shape of the new ideas about how ...”

“... duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired ...”

“... called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging ...”

“... At 20, he joined the brotherhood of freedom-fighters, who now became his closest family. Michael Collins, for whom O’Malley retained a certain sardonic respect, sent him to London to buy arms, and posted him around the Irish countryside to organise and train Volunteer groups. O’Malley found his ideal comrades among the South Tipperary Brigade, and as the ...”

“... sons, Chris Wilding, she could be ‘pretty shameless’ and ‘embarrassing’. She asked Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some ...”

“... but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that ...”

“... by the splendid pictures: as a catalogue, however, it is a most valuable possession. For Peter Padfield in his Armada the context spreads wide to include not only the historical background but the designing, building, rigging and sailing of the ships on either side; and on this subject he is well-informed and interesting, since he spent much of his ...”

“... wrote a paean to Marat to protest against Hitler’s rise to power. Decades later the success of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, adapted for film by Peter Brook, ensured that the myth ramified through the 1960s counterculture, with references in the music of Judy Collins and Love. As a ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... like a good child, he chalks onto the great guns of the battery given names: ‘The Reverend Collins’, ‘General Tilney’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’. Something in the image hints at the mingling of pastoral and violence, of passion and illiteracy which can go to make up both human bonding and human learning, especially in Kipling’s late stories ...”

“... Yitzhak Yezernitsky. While underground he adopted the codename ‘Michael’ in homage to Michael Collins (despite some myth-making, almost no self-styled anti-colonial movement took Irish republicanism as a model, with the exception of Revisionist Zionism), and then changed his name to Shamir. In October 1983, months after Thatcher won her second election ...”

“... Kate O’Mara and when I next look lining up to meet Her Majesty are Ms O’Mara along with Joan Collins and Shirley Bassey, the impression being that anyone can get to speak to the monarch provided you’re pushy enough. But it’s all very casual, so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and ...”