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“... uses a different sentence-length from the length one uses in the TLS. If, per impossibile, the New York Review of Books and the Sun were to ask me to review very similar books tomorrow, the outcome would be very different in terms of verbal constructions, vocabulary and paragraphing, even before sub-editors got their hands on the copy. Again, one writes ...”

“... in that he has no theme, no political stance. He is an unusual scholar. He practised law in New York for 25 years – and he writes more like a judge delivering a favourable summing-up than a defence advocate, like Cole, always giving his client the benefit of the doubt. George Spater then became chairman and chief executive officer of American ...”

“... Yet, as Momigliano recalled in 1975, in a review of Democracy Ancient and Modern for the New York Review of Books, Finley disappointed Italian Marxists like Di Benedetto, Lanza, and those looking for a ‘historian of revolutions’. He determinedly opposed the notion that there were quick and facile lessons to be applied from Athens or Rome in support ...”

“... packaged as a cultural commodity, casually churned out at ‘Mostly Mozart’ marathons in New York and London, reduced to background music for the annual passeggiata of the Euronouveaux riches at the Salzburg Festival. Performances of Mozart are now rites rather than occasions for discovery. It is incumbent on us to say we love Mozart. The affirmative ...”

“... basically do whatever he liked, and indeed, in this case, he and his brother, the nautical Duke of York, took a personal interest in the accuracy of various versions of Hooke’s watch, monitoring their performance over weeks and months in the royal closet at Whitehall. Charles II had time for repeated discussions with this physically ill-favoured, socially ...”

“... city on earth, at the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, though by then New York was larger than London and the empire had been shorn of India. You might wonder about this. Can it really be that in the early 1950s British children were taught that they lived in ‘the greatest empire the world has ever seen’? (I don’t remember that I ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. While ...”

“... Brown’s sonorously essential Collected Poems, and the first of his works to be set to music by Peter Maxwell Davies, with whom Brown worked closely in developing the St Magnus arts festival on Orkney. The 14 individually titled couplets of this poem set out, as Fergusson notices, ‘the 14 stations of Christ’s Passion and death reflected in the cycle of ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... the West End was primarily theatreland, with more theatres to the acre than any city except New York, but the continuing war between art and commerce meant that while Ibsen and Shaw were transforming British drama, it was Charley’s Aunt, Peter Pan and The Scarlet Pimpernel that played to packed houses. Yet there was ...”

“... something more important about ‘British culture’ at the time than jokes about the duchess of York’s asparagus breath, and Bucknell might have asked why it was so.Each of The Treasuries’ eight chapters considers a particular anthology or group of anthologies; together they cover 300 years, arriving at the present day. Bucknell doesn’t claim that her ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... the trials of enterprise, dynasty and corporate bureaucracy through the American 20th century. Peter Newman’s Company of Adventurers is a history of the early Hudson’s Bay Company, and here the spirit of enterprise is traced back to the origin of the Canadian nation itself. Historical narrative restores adventure to the routinised world of the modern ...”

“... John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the ...”