“... To be of that fellowship, one had to be pretty determined: William Allingham, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, was a regular companion on Carlyle’s afternoon walks, though he is ‘perpetually busy with Fraser & as I told himself long ago has a tendency to be a bore’. Carlyle’s collective term for visitors was ...”

“... One of adventive’s meanings is ‘imperfectly naturalised’. And it’s good to learn from G.S. Fraser’s book on Durrell that however long the novelist thought about these works, he wrote them, or at least the last three, very quickly: Balthazar in six weeks, Mountolive in 12 and Clea in four. It’s good to know too that however portentous he could sound ...”

“... parliamentarians are a socially conformist bunch: they shopped for furniture and fabrics at John Lewis, Harrods, Laura Ashley, Heal’s, the House of Fraser, Debenhams, Habitat, IKEA, BoConcept and OKA; when looking for deals they went to Argos, Currys, Comet, Marks & Sparks, B&Q and Woolworths, until it closed. They ...”

“... and nurses; Arthur, the Canadian radical nationalist preoccupied with a journal called Resurgence; Fraser Buchanan, the blackmailer of the literary world; and, above all, the Royal Porcupine, a Canadian ‘con-create’ poet whose bizarre activities are compatible with an uncharitable reading of the Sixties’ avant-garde. This is, of course, to select only ...”

“... was widely mourned. ‘His tireless work to deliver safe consumption rooms,’ the first minister, John Swinney, said, ‘leaves an important legacy which will be remembered.’ By the time the Thistle opened this year, the tide seemed to be changing in many countries, with abstinence-based schemes on the rise and SDCFs branded as ‘state-sponsored ...”

“... Vivien Merchant in 1980 (she died two years later of alcoholic poisoning) and married Antonia Fraser. During the Sixties, Pinter had, we now learn, an affair with TV presenter Joan Bakewell, which Billington, before finally coming clean, presents to us with remarkable coyness. We are first told that Pinter ‘began a serious extra-marital relationship ...”

“... of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out its holdings of shares to short sellers.) Being denounced by an archbishop isn’t the worst ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... encyclopedia of the arts and sciences contains an entry along the lines of this one from John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum: ‘MICROPHONES are Instruments contrived to magnifie small Sounds, as Microscopes do small Objects.’Wheatstone, inventor of the concertina, came from a family of musical instrument-makers. The tuning fork featured heavily in ...”

“... absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories.’ And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

“... black velvet jacket, collar and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a ...”

“... reviews for a Selected Poems, published in the same year, which was one of the first titles in John Lehmann’s ‘New Hogarth Library’ series. The exceptional circumstances of the war not only contributed to Day-Lewis’s literary success; they provided the enabling conditions for his most significant love affair. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann reviewed ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”