“... and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a late-life idea of her as a treasurably naughty grande dame, all genteel camp and classily to-the-point prose. Others, however, saw her as a glamorous point of contact with developments on the Continent. She showed an interest ...”

“... someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel.’In July 1964 someone, in the shape of Cork Smith, an editor at Viking, was sufficiently compelled to offer Williams a contract. The novel was published as Stoner, after its central character, the following April, and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted ...”

“... just such a reaction chain. When the host, the comedian Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For several days afterwards, countless commentators, celebrities and social media users sought to distinguish ...”

“... encounter, but also to absolve themselves of responsibility for its violence. Darwin wrote from Sydney in 1839 that ‘there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ Fifty years later the French zoologist Armand de Quatrefages described Indigenous Tasmanians as ...”

“... supposed to do, she claimed she was upbraided by the governor, the terrible Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, for dealing ‘such a blow to white prestige that the British might lose Burma’. (Hyam has some harsh words for Dorman-Smith: ‘aloof and blimpish … typical of a certain type of ineffably awful Old ...”

“... from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps because they were now running underground. During his wilderness years Powell became the Baptist of the Brexit movement. Puffing a book entitled Enoch Was ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... and social customs that were fast disappearing. Working alongside the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith, Thomson humanises and even heroicises his subjects, countering the caricatures of Gillray or those Punch cartoons where the poor have simian faces or porcine snouts. Street photography could be used to stir nostalgia or urge the comfortable classes to ...”

“... conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between Grandstand and Jukebox Jury (only now, teatime is a couple ...”

“... supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the sisters but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation and ...”

“... never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could be ascertained, and examined his sources with what looked like, but cannot quite have been, exhaustive care: for recently there has been a boom in such research. A procession of students combs the archives in New ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... Hardy had not ‘sufficient admiration for himself’ to write his memoirs, while Florence told Sydney Cockerell he would probably burn all his notes (i.e. the text) if it were ever referred to as an ‘autobiography’. I don’t think the third-person disguise was simply camouflage: it corresponded to a need in Hardy the writer as well as in Hardy the man ...”

“... department reading list, along with Taylor Caldwell and all those other books by Twain. I read Sydney Sheldon’s first five novels, Judith Krantz’s first three; until I went to college, I believed that Watership Down was the best book I’d ever read – and I was right. What attracted me then, though I didn’t realise it until years later, wasn’t ...”