“... which David Thomson’s mother belonged, was very grand and patriarchal. The patriarch, ‘Uncle Robert’, was Viscount Finlay of Nairn who had been a Liberal MP with Gladstone, Lord Chancellor under Lloyd George and, in his eighties, a judge of the International Court at the Hague. Twenty or thirty people, servants or relations, stood in the dining-room ...”

“... and to keep order in Russian cities. Like Stolypin, Kornilov fell foul of his political superiors. Alexander Kerensky became Premier in July 1917 and instructed Kornilov to quell rebellion in Petrograd. But Kerensky panicked, suspecting Kornilov of being about to organise a coup d’état, and Kornilov, when ordered to turn back from Petrograd, concluded that ...”

“... series of transitions from the rule of the pharaohs to that of the Macedonian Greek successors of Alexander the Great and, eventually, the Romans. Now they can add to that list of finds a signal contribution to the study of Greek tragedy. One of the papyri excavated by Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known ...”

“... her right. Perhaps she didn’t feel she had been well seated. Never mind; I was able to introduce Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom were very nice to him, as was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go ...”

“... care and the cunning of the style’, as he has written of Yeats’s ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, ‘its very finish’, serves ‘to place all impulsive decisions many drafts anterior to the version we read’. There is a beautiful neutrality, most of the time, in his tone. He gives nothing away. He does not know, just as the reader must ...”

“... leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art ...”

“... by High Church Anglican Tories. Some Presbyterians, including Castlereagh’s grandfather Alexander Stewart, went further, immersing themselves in the ‘commonwealth’ legacy of 17th-century radicalism. By the 18th century, the Good Old Cause of the Civil War had been revised to meet contemporary tastes and susceptibilities, with Puritanism given a ...”

“... exit from power, this time for a long time, perhaps for ever.’ Not long afterwards, I go to see Alexander Batanov, a smart, self-confident man in his thirties who has turned himself from an academic researcher into a political consultant. He has worked with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and helped engineer a public reconciliation between this wily ...”

“... King Alexander ​ of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille on 9 October 1934, alongside Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother ...”

“... warriors? (Wilson is not the first woman to translate the complete Iliad into English; Caroline Alexander did it in 2016.) The Homeric epics are superficially gendered: ‘The Ilias he made for the men, and the Odysseïs for the other sex,’ Richard Bentley declared in 1713. Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) is the apotheosis of the ...”

“... the ‘art’ to which the novel ostensibly addresses itself is no longer literature but painting. Alexander Wedderburn, the white hope of the new Verse Drama movement, is now writing a play about Van Gogh, The Yellow Chair. Van Gogh’s life, letters, theories and paintings provide the narrative’s principal leitmotifs, while his Still-Life with Books is ...”

“... is still authentic magic. Memoirs and studies as good as these do indeed rehouse an age. Peter Alexander’s biography of Plomer is the most professional of these three books, but it suffers from doing its job exhaustively. Plomer needs doing in impressions, like the sketch of him as the novelist St Quentin in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, or ...”

“... the fancy of generations of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against ...”

“... men, courtiers, emperors, bores, Margaret Thatcher, fools, bad poets, frocks, personal enemies, Robert Walpole, reason, lust, excrement, travel, ex-soldiers, Americans, patrons, opera, religious orthodoxies, sexual deviants, shopkeepers, dildos, merchants, political parties and all self-deluded asses who believe themselves superior to the rest of ...”