“... Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin of English trade and sea power. The Dutch, with whom England was about to fight the second ...”

“... Several months.’ ‘Wullah! What would one do in Damascus for months? What is wrong with New York?’ (A foreigner is always an American here.) ‘I’m English,’ I said. He mumbled a welcome. Then, why was I not going on to Lebanon? In Damascus I could see the Great Mosque and the big bazaar in an afternoon. Then I could go to Beirut. He had heard ...”

“... The Cinémathèque in Paris played an important role, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the key venue for the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s originality as a curator lay in his awareness that it never would be. (Until the ...”

“... however, Charcot had nothing to do with it. In 1931, Charcot’s son wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review: ‘Without contesting the literary and imaginative qualities of Dr Munthe I can certify that Dr Munthe never was trained by my father … I was, myself, a student at the Salpêtrière then, and can certify that he was not one of his ...”

“... not the son of his mother’s husband, Joseph. The accusation is repeated in the Chester and York plays, while in the Towneley plays the preferred word is ‘mare’ (as in ‘night-mare’, being ridden by a succubus). The famous Second Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley cycle has the sheep-stealer Mak’s wife, Gill, pretend that the lamb they have ...”

“... well down his list of priorities. ‘I don’t care about copyright law,’ he told his friend Peter Eckersley in 2010. ‘Healthcare, financial reform – those are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.’ He had a change of heart about freedom of information more generally: he’d started to notice that the government and ...”

“... he told me, I just believed him, because he believed in himself to the fullest,’ Zelma told Peter Guralnick. In the summer of 1962, a month before his 21st birthday, Redding got his big break. On 14 August or thereabouts (accounts vary), he drove Jenkins to Memphis to record at Stax and persuaded the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart, to let him sing a ...”

“... the Ormonde Hotel during the first nights of the Blitz until he secured a berth on a boat to New York. Read’s ‘nest of gentle artists’ had scattered to the winds. If the Isokon​ stands for modernism’s prewar moment in Britain, then a flat-roofed glass house in the Scottish Borders gives us its postwar legacy. High Sunderland was commissioned in ...”

“... were ‘infested with tigers’. But – like the late antique holy men studied by the historian Peter Brown – these gurus remained involved with the societies they had fled. In the years before his trip to Chicago, Datta went far beyond Bengal, visiting Hinduism’s holiest places. Like the Buddhist lama in Kipling’s Kim, whose ‘search’ for a holy ...”

“... US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the US to discuss the case with American officials and to push for more co-operation between British security services and the FBI. But as Kerbaj’s account shows, he didn’t ...”

“... nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim ...”

“... a government pension, he wrote: ‘I depend upon myself and do the best I can, which is bad.’ As Peter Whitmer puts it in The Inner Elvis (1996), ‘there was a history to the emptiness that flawed Vernon’s character and created the subsequent psychological hole in Elvis’s personality. Both the lack of and the need for a father figure seemed to be a ...”

“... with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ...”

“... agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”