“... dreadfully unnerving to the young. Several virgins of my acquaintance went directly astray in the hope of becoming great dancers – a mistaken notion.’ One can see why virgins went astray. It is a splendid book, an inspiring book, doors and windows and eyes and arms wide open to the world (‘according to legend,’ de Mille says of Duncan’s childhood ...”

“... of responding to an economic downturn beyond cutting spending and raising interest rates in the hope that prices and wages would drop so low that the economy would right itself. Populations simply had to ride out periods of deflation and mass unemployment, as the state couldn’t do much to help them: pursuing expansionary fiscal or monetary measures (what ...”

“... men. One of them seemed to carry an individuality in his face, a vision that seemed bereft of easy hope or compositional completion, but carried with it a sort of implacability, a stubbornness, a power which came from knowledge and a sense, written into every inch of his face, that he was someone who would not take orders easily or go looking for ...”

“... 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... had long ago laid down for the traveller in exotic places. The Chinese are said proverbially to hope to live in uninteresting times, but the local times were unusually interesting when Segalen arrived in Peking, and he made good use of them. After three hundred years, the Manchu dynasty was just about at an end. A year earlier, the Emperor Kuang-Hsu had ...”

“... that very ugly skirmish with the dragoon Masi, probably instigated by the authorities in the hope of dislodging the Gamba family and their radical English associates from that part of Italy – could have done with more and sharper attention. In some ways, the second half of Seymour’s biography, dealing with Mary Shelley’s life between her ...”

“... makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ‘prince of light and hope’ and the ‘only adult in the room’, who tried to keep things ‘on the sunny side of the street’. The New York Times even endorsed him as the Republican candidate, despite a long anti-union, anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, anti-mass ...”

“... cheer Duke Leopold II of Tuscany subsequently made their way to the Piedmontese legation to cheer Charles Albert, the king of Sardinia-Piedmont, and finally, with their spirits fired up, marched into the Piazza Venezia, where the Austrian legation was situated. As the foreign overlords of Lombardy and Venetia and the conservative Catholic hegemon on the ...”

“... Stravinsky to Antibes (he didn’t come) to tutor her husband in harmony. (For a while, with no hope of succeeding on Broadway and still struggling to find his musical direction, Porter studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.) Linda’s first husband, also a Yalie, had the dubious distinction of being the first man ...”

“... offer of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round ...”

“... hands) I’m from the Standard.Leo: Yes, I know.Mr Birbeck: I’ve brought a photographer. I hope you don’t mind? We thought a little study of you in your own home would be novel and interesting.Leo: (bitterly) I’m sure it would.Birbeck proceeds to ask Leo, a playwright who has just had another successful West End first night, what his other plays ...”

“... husband, Henry Lord Darnley, was, Dunn reports, ‘the tallest young man a tall young queen could hope to meet.’ John Guy writes in My Heart Is My Own: ‘He was more effeminate and baby-faced than his father, but the implications of that were not yet talked about.’ And later: ‘He was almost certainly bisexual, as was the vogue of young hedonistic ...”

“... in the same guileless way: undergraduate poets asked round to read him their verse in the hope that one thing might lead to another. However, on the day appointed it was not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said: ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history ...”

“... and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were ...”