“... still less of other ‘educationists’: one of the works of reference most frequently cited in Cecil Lang’s wonderfully informative notes is a contemporary social register unashamedly called The Upper Ten Thousand. But although Arnold was not averse to hobnobbing with the rich and titled, he was well aware that this was not his natural milieu: ‘the ...”

“... Two months after Tennyson’s death Burne-Jones was reluctantly following the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence ...”

“... not be easy to name more recent comedians likely to win his approval. He quotes a letter from Robert Graves which, although it is about the poetry, gives an accurate representation of the way Fuller often sees his personality: ‘oppressed, stoical, humorous’, and not given to ‘chancing his arm’. There are various asides in which he speaks of a ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless 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 ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of course! Something ...”

“... from looped cords or ribbons. A Lilliputian pair by Hilliard showing Elizabeth I and her favourite Robert Dudley nestles in the palm of a mannequin’s hand in a manner that instantly, and vividly, communicates their exceptionally small size – and by extension, hinting at the frisson of secrecy that must have accompanied their exchange.Other miniatures are ...”

“... Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save Cudlipp’s skin. A couple of years later the man who had toppled Cudlipp, Harry Guy Bartholomew, was toppled himself, and it was King who pushed him ...”

“... a 21st-century viewpoint, it seems more like a pioneering eco-poem. Human ‘dominion’ over what Robert Burns in ‘To a Mouse’ termed ‘nature’s social union’ had often disturbed the Romantic poets, but Muir intensified this by bringing together fears that technology might lead to human extinction with concerns about how to restore a lost balance ...”

“... ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs by kicking her furiously.’Even Robert Lowell got carried away. In his long sonnet sequence ‘History’, he imagines one of Mary’s famous flights by night across Scotland on horseback as happening by car:We roared off hell-wheel and scattered the soft mob;happily only one man splashed the ...”

“... deplored in an annulment case as ‘the position and actions of the male’. Poor Lew Ayres. Poor Robert Montgomery. Even John Barrymore looked a bit unready beside her. Androgynous? Castrating? Lesbian? Who cares. The fascination with the home lives of the stars always misses the basic point: they are actors, wearers of costumes, speakers of other people’s ...”

“... and legs emerge. The impression of solidity was partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly ...”

“... on the Kinetoscope in 1895 by combining camera and projector in their Cinématographe. In Britain Robert Paul produced his own camera and projector when Edison refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ‘transport’ an audience to ...”

“... Ports. Reformed, with a capital ‘R’, means Calvinist. The historian of the Jews in England was Cecil Roth, not Philip. Stephen Gosson never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I confess that I said he ...”

“... a tyrannical British king just so that two centuries later it could commune with the spirits of Cecil Rhodes and John Buchan in neo-imperialist seances alongside the set of countries bearing the queen’s head on their coins. But this hasn’t stopped certain Anglosphericals formulating a new mythology of Anglo oneness. In his 2006 book A History of the ...”

“... are mingling, too, with many who are long dead. Ronald Reagan and Meryl Streep, Bette Davis and Robert De Niro jostle closely together in several large spaces, chambers for different sins in the afterlife – for vamping, sharp-shooting, taxi-driving – while a flickering crowd comes and goes in an endless loop on screens and monitors. The stars have been ...”