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“... what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur Cash, coped with the difficulty by writing, in effect, two books. The first volume, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, was published in 1975 and left Sterne in 1760, on the road from York to London, hurrying to embrace his literary destiny. We ...”

“... life and this punitive regime was brutal. And then, when Blunkett was 12, his father died. Because Arthur Blunkett had been working after pensionable age – his employer, the East Midlands Gas Board, had asked him to stay on to train new employees – they initially refused to pay compensation. The resulting legal struggles his mother went through ...”

“... soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days that he was ‘no part of the 90s’. Others welcomed the affiliation. The 1930s poets owed their instant celebrity to their ...”

“... of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most ...”

“... continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it was reissued by an American gay ...”

“... he’d applied for an academic job at a university in Iran. The man’s home videos with his young son reminded him of himself and his own father, and he suddenly realised that the documents he was about to leak would separate him from his family for ever. Snowden​ had reason to believe that those leaks might have little impact. In the summer of ...”

“... and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in their grave shortly afterwards by their grieving vent-widow. In the 1950s, an Australian singer who used to appear on stage with her vent-husband Herbert Dexter found ...”

“... opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our ...”

“... as a picture ofa normal little boy wearing shorts but was soon reworked into a full-frontal of a young man with a shock of blond hair and an adult’s chest hair, completely naked except for a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could have read the painting as anything other than a brazen self-portrait by an ...”

“... out together, producing the webzine Spiked, setting up media training for teens (Debating Matters, Young Journalists’ Academy, a ‘programme for London state-school pupils who have the passion and the guts, but not “the right contacts”’) and a confusing cloud of other organisations: the Manifesto Club, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she had great beauty. As a young woman, Alma Schindler, Emil’s oldest daughter, was said to be ‘the loveliest girl in Vienna’, with lustrous dark hair and a self-confident gaze. She had her first kiss aged 17 with Gustav Klimt, while travelling in Genoa. Klimt found her beautiful but ...”

“... terrorise the Irish, and later ordered similar therapy in Iraq, bombing villages with the aid of Arthur (not yet Bomber) Harris, who had already done some ‘policing from the air’ on the North-West Frontier. O’Dwyer too was not slow to send in the RAF to bomb rioters in Gujranwala, about fifty miles north of Amritsar on 14 April, the day after the ...”

“... as it had in the days of Andrew Jackson, the great champion of the white settlers on the frontier. Young Harry read Mark Twain, played the piano and listened to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for ...”

“... vanguard of the ascending bourgeoisie, becomes the lumpen-bourgeoisie in the age of its decay,’ Arthur Koestler wrote. Nowhere in Anglo-America is this phenomenon more evident than in the British media, which even at its most reactionary used to maintain some commitment to wit and style. The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house ...”