“... had awarded him a grant). In fact, Schwartz vacillated over his book’s merits. He told Robert Hivnor that he was ‘in the middle of what will probably be the longest and worst poem in American literature’ and wrote to R.P. Blackmur that he was ‘publishing a blunder 261 pages long’. But to Berryman he confessed: ‘Every time I read or see ...”

“... following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”

“... for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so led eventually to the abdication. Adrian Tinniswood, whose book combines a panoramic view of life and architecture in the interwar years with pin-sharp detail and the sort of springy prose that comes with a complete command of the material, takes ...”

“... uselessness in a ‘high-tech’ economy is by now proverbial. Clinton’s Secretary of labour Robert Reich, for example, has made an entire career out of mourning their fate, while at every turn disclaiming any intention of interfering with the divine processes of the economy – he takes it for granted, as almost everybody else does, that American ...”

“... Hollinghurst, the films of Derek Jarman, Mark Merlis’s American Studies and An Arrow’s Flight, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and, above all, Neil Bartlett’s inexhaustible Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde as well as his more recent Mr Clive and Mr Page; all of which use the past to redefine gay existence ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... both to Runciman’s romantic extrapolations and to a prose style which at times seems dated, what Robert Irwin has characterised as his ‘Beau Geste idiom’. Abulafia declined when his own publisher asked him to write a history of the Sicilian Vespers on the grounds that ‘one does not impudently replace a classic’, but ‘classic’ does not mean ...”

“... first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts ...”

“... for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was measured, and the findings entered in a series of ledgers known as the ‘Feet Books’; the bespoke shoemakers then modelled wooden lasts to be used to make the shoes; these effigies were labelled with the client’s personal number ...”

“... year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and an ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”

“... who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being ...”

“... who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His ...”

“... bodies, and transmitted images of Iraqi civilians killed by one of our smart bombs. Senator Simpson of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was labelled ‘Baghdad Ted’, an appropriate consort for ‘Hanoi Jane’. Military and political leaders were instantly dispatched to the ...”