“... his bravado. Mortimer Menpes described him as ‘slight, small-boned and extremely dainty’. Robert Goodloe Harper Pennington thought that Whistler permitted few to see the ‘tender’ flesh beneath the ‘shell’. ‘You are tender-hearted,’ Pennington wrote, though ‘I dare say you would smack me “good and hard” if I was within reach.’ The ...”

“... in view of the use which Strawson makes of his naturalism, may want to return to Hume will find Robert Fogelin’s Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature a useful guide. Fogelin offers a detailed, though not systematically structured, account of the various sceptical arguments in the Treatise. In contrast to many recent interpreters, Fogelin ...”

“... art clearly has ‘work’ to do outside the museum. Hickey argues that the public exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio in the early 1990s caused such outrage not because of its content but because Mapplethorpe’s photographs were beautiful, and through their beauty they celebrated their content: ‘It was not that men were making it ... but ...”

“... neighbours. Nevertheless East Europeans are apt to marvel, Miranda-like, at their brave new world. Robert Darnton interviewed, among others, Reinhard Becker, the local councillor responsible for the environment in Bitterfeld, East Germany – surely the most thankless municipal job in Europe. When Becker visited his West German twin town he was ...”

“... Andrew Millar, William 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 John Pinkerton, an Edinburgh ...”

“... hundred-odd reporters present, besides Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune. Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, ...”

“... alive and around at the time. I discovered that even this could be fudged in some standard works. Robert Payne is an acknowledged expert on Russian affairs, author of Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait, The Image of Chekhov, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak. The Life and Death of Lenin (1964) runs to 672 pages. I returned to it to check the death toll in the ...”

“... in another way too: as intermediary, go-between and tipster. She encouraged both her brother Alexander and her lifelong friend Louisine Elder to start collecting: Elder’s first purchase was Degas’s Rehearsal of the Ballet, which with Cassatt’s In the Loge became the earliest important Impressionist works displayed in the US. Elder was to become the ...”

“... was found beaten and strangled to death in her Ford Fairlane on a quiet road near her home outside Alexander City, Alabama. The reverend, who had purchased several life insurance policies on his wife, was tried for her murder but acquitted after their neighbour, Dorcas Anderson, recanted some earlier testimony and provided him with an alibi. She and the ...”

“... and internment; several are old comrades whom he had believed dead. He is reunited with his friend Robert Hirsch, a legendary fighter who tore about Occupied France in SS uniform rescuing Ludwig and other refugees from internment camps and the pursuing Gestapo. Now Robert is managing a small electrical goods shop. He slowly ...”

“... of the Foreign Office, which supervised SIS. The Permanent Under-Secretary of the FO, Sir Alexander Cadogan, held regular meetings with the heads of SOE and SIS (or their deputies) in order to reconcile differences. His chairmanship, which was much more impartial than Foot allows, would have been more effective if a single minister had been involved ...”

“... forty other translations into English (setting aside such antiquated versions as those by Alexander Ross in 1649 and George Sale in 1734). Some of the most popular have been done by Muslims and vetted by the scholars of al-Azhar in Cairo. Pickthall was a convert to Islam and, under the patronage of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he worked on a translation ...”

“... still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie ...”

“... reign to rethink the seismic dynastic shift. And as a reminder of James’s kingly experience, Alexander Courtney’s James VI, Britannic Prince concentrated on his 36-year reign as king of Scotland, before he succeeded Elizabeth; a second volume taking up the story from 1603 is promised. Meanwhile, Gareth Russell’s Queen James is an intimate biography ...”

“... of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”