“... the malicious remarks she makes about friends and houseguests as soon as they are out of earshot (Joseph Alsop, she tells Mahoney, ‘is a fag … There’s no reason for my liking him except that he was very good during the McCarthy period’). Some of this tartufferie is good for a hollow laugh – or even two or three. Bad behaviour on the part of the ...”

“... is right’ marches and the grind of time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment ...”

“... remain almost unimaginable now, things have changed so quickly. As recently as 1970 the essayist Joseph Epstein could write the following in Harper’s magazine: Private acceptance of homosexuality, in my experience, is not to be found, even among the most liberal-minded, sophisticated and liberated people. Homosexuality may be the one subject left in ...”

“... with some interesting annotations. These annotations, I can now reveal, are in the hand of Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. This is a new fact, though not a surprising one. Puckering took a particular interest in what we might today call ‘state security’, and together with another high-ranking court official and Privy ...”

“... it has only songs, legends, it is somehow outside of time’; or it can be more insulting, as in Joseph Brodsky’s (unpublished but publicly performed) poem about foolish ‘hohli’ – the pejorative term for Ukrainians – and their ‘gibberish’ national poetry. But the language and imagery were more sombre in internet gifs and jokes. Ukrainians were ...”

“... Kelebek Korse, or Butterfly Corset, a bra shop that has been on Istiklal Caddesi since 1936. Joseph Brodsky travelled to Istanbul in the 1980s because he felt ‘for some reason, that here, in apartments, shops and coffeehouses, I should find intact an atmosphere that at present seems to have totally vanished everywhere else’. Inside these ...”

“... voyage to Australia, beckoned by the National Gallery of Victoria, which he had advised, and by Joseph Burke of Melbourne University, who believed that Clark would stimulate cultural interests in his compatriots. Clark wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious ...”

“... Library). In the 1930s, a group of young biologists in Cambridge associated with the embryologist Joseph Needham formed the Theoretical Biology Club (TBC), calling themselves ‘organicists’ in an attempt to transcend the tired opposition between mechanism and vitalism. At the International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London in ...”

“... here, far from softening it, themselves took on the ruthless quality of the local nature. (John Berryman’s father shot himself in Clearwater, Florida, in 1926, after some failed land speculation.) Eventually, made safe – though never altogether – for year-round habitation by the twin miracles of air-conditioning and refrigeration. Florida still ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... a 1386 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, or history of the world, now in the library of St John’s, Oxford, the text is followed not only by an index, but also by an account of how to use it: ‘This number, 72, indicates that the heading from the table can be found on the leaf where 72 is written in the top corner.’ Unfortunately, the scribe copied ...”

“... kept under lock and key. So were the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the ...”

“... Gertrude Jekyll lived to see the first waves of the tide of gentility that swept over Surrey until John Betjeman could not look at one of Miss Jekyll’s beloved rhododendrons without thinking of a stockbroker. Less intellectual, in many ways less effective than Morris, she was, nevertheless, in one sense nearer the heart of the issue. In her work as a garden ...”

“... they could. In any case, he argues, Mrs Thatcher’s Wets were less silent than she and Sir Keith Joseph had been in the Heath Cabinet, and far noisier than the prudent men who staffed her later Cabinets. It is an honourable account but it leaves out what I thought at the time (perhaps wrongly) was the Wets’ real weakness: they had no political base in the ...”

“... to lodge a protest with the school, so sure was she that Joe was better at everything. The key to John Kennedy’s character lay essentially in acute maternal deprivation – and in the contrast between his cold, prudish mother and his overwhelming, earthy father. His mother could not bear to kiss or even touch her children (except to beat them), left them ...”