“... that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She had little option: a newspaper had found the servant who’d played the spirit she summoned – that of Bien Boa, a courtly and richly moustachioed 16th-century Brahmin. Not for the first time, Richet refused to admit that what he had witnessed was a trick, and the ...”

“... written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). If you don’t like ...”

“... Commons met for the first time in the Chapter House.)It seems wrong that these monuments are so little regarded. They make the abbey the most vivid and uncompromising encounter with Britain’s old power elites in the full glory of their Ozymandias-like hubris (Shelley, incidentally, only got a measly Poets’ Corner stone tablet, alongside Keats, in ...”

“... tendency ever (foreseeably) to die down. In Britain Thatcher tries to curry favour with voters by Little Englander sniping at European union – which nevertheless moves nearer and nearer in basic economic arrangements. In other countries nationalism is more likely to erupt in terrible extremes of desperation and damage as car bombs destroy the remnants of ...”

“... by applauding the victory or blessing the cause of their own state. Thus English historians saw little to question in the plundering raids of Henry V or even of William the Conqueror. French historians saw little to question in the Empire of Napoleon. The jus ad bellum has proved a will o’ the wisp, though still ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”

“... of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the following year. ‘It would only be proper,’ he wrote, ‘for you to have your own private book of verses, even if it were very small and if the verses were very bad.’ Although certain lines and images from both are carried over ...”

“... course of the life, and the influences which were there from the beginning. O’Malley bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a ...”

“... a tawdry broadside, returning with too much pleasure to scandals uncovered by others with too little caution. The pilgrim dips his pen into the noisome ink of the Hollywood gossip-monger, until he himself stinks of the odours he means us to associate with the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a ...”

“... of ‘Maud’ is a survivor, since his            bury me, bury me Deeper, ever so little deeper and his embracing ‘the doom assign’d’ indicate a desire not to live. Moreover, he has madness thrust upon him, whereas Magowan has been studying to achieve it. His true forebear is Arthur Rimbaud with his ...”

“... just merits the attention of a critical-biographer – as well write a book on Walter Legge or Arthur Gelb. Since the Lamberts as a dynasty do not have the special cultural force of the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists or even the Auden Group, we are left with the supposition that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and ...”

“... that he is aware of the dangers inherent in this kind of thinking, but it seems to me he does very little to avoid them. There is an assumption that the value of Modernism is not only aesthetic but moral, and not to be Modernist can earn you a severe ethical condemnation. So when Yeats remarks that if he wakes up thinking about Maud Gonne a great sweetness ...”

“... ruthlessly opening the stitched edge of an armhole for the resetting of a sleeve. She spoke little, implacably private, not much liked. On the day of the showing, wearing yet another Chanel suit, she would sit on the stairs, looking down into the mirrored salon, watching, unwatched. Gabrielle Chanel was not a ‘legend’, as this handsome but somewhat ...”

“... until something stops it. In space, there is no friction, no air resistance. You could aim your little spaceprobe at the Moon or Mars like a snooker ball at the end of a cue and it would roll perfectly across the true cloth of the void to the pocket you intended. But the Earth revolves at 1000 mph at the Equator, and at the same time travels through space ...”

“... writers, artists and intellectuals, like John Steinbeck, the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ‘plain-folks’, patriotic ...”