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“... Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingston, could buy two quarts of Vent Vert perfume. ‘Bill Paley said you could do it,’ she told Schoenbrun, by way of thanks. An example, Halberstam rather tendentiously concludes, of how ‘news was becoming less and less important; entertainment was bigger and bigger.’ Such little episodes are the best and brightest ...”

“... could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had looked her over and said: ‘ “Heart-hard. Hard as nails!” I grinned with pride, and never forgot.’ Trying to push Rupert away from her, in 1912, Noel confessed: ‘The better things need passion: and ...”

“... deranged enthusiasts. Constantine Rafinesque, according to Conniff a ‘brilliant crackpot’, is said to have submitted a paper for publication describing a dozen new species of thunder and lightning. He scooted across America, trying to get his name for a species into print first, even if he had not actually examined it. In the process he wrongfooted many ...”

“... While Murchison and Lyell were conducting their researches, vast congregations were coming to hear Edward Irving, John Cumming and others preach on the signs of the last days. The rise of infidel philosophy (including the doctrines of geology) was said to signal the nearness of the end. Cumming thought David Hume was the ...”

“... newcomers, arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside. ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman ...”

“... company together for Notes at lunchtime. At Max’s invitation I spoke my thoughts to them ... I said that the audience’s pleasure at the story had trapped the actors into indulging their feelings, and the stage was awash with sentiment. Also, the music making, instead of being schmaltzy and to be taken critically, had become hearty English party ...”

“... woman, is in the act of creating the world: ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God said “Er – could I just see the darkness again?”’ If this is not Pope John Paul II’s kind of God, it’s as much because of the hesitancy as the gender. If ...”

“... for the reader: I was also visited by wonderful dreams about flying which I later learned are said to be an indication of sexual desire. Whether or not this is true, the dreams were deliciously exciting, though having to stay airborne required much concentration … I’m regretful that I no longer have these dreams. Vague erotic fantasies, undirected to ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... captives Venus, which of course had no meaning in the village from which she had been taken, but said plenty about their expectations, intentions and transgressions. 'Abolition of the Slave Trade' by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) Cruikshank based his drawing on a story told by William Wilberforce in a speech delivered in the House of Commons a week earlier, in ...”

“... whose work has not worn well. ‘I think one ought to be downright cruel to him,’ D.H. Lawrence said, and many have been. Max Beerbohm was, when at a dinner party he asked Davies, ‘How long is it since Shaw discovered you?’; on being told it was 13 or 14 years, he replied, ‘Oh dear dear – and has it been going on all this time?’ and added that ...”

“... had already proved impossible: in 1553, the last year of the reign of Elizabeth’s brother, Edward VI, an English expedition had tried to sail to China round the north of Russia. Most of the sailors froze to death near present-day Murmansk, but some of them made it to Moscow, where they struck a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible – nearly as good as a ...”

“... by W.T. Stead, in a compartment by itself. It exemplified the New Journalism which, according to Edward Dicey, then editor of the Observer, catered to consumers who ‘liked to have their mental food given them in minces and snippets, not in chops and joints’. As Curtis demonstrates, Law and Order reports increased newspaper sales. After the Chapman ...”

“... proved an unignorable source for current work, in the way that Heidegger and Wittgenstein have. Edward Skidelsky sees a recent positive shift in the winds of his reputation, but he is suspicious of the reasons for it. The very idealism and liberalism that make Cassirer seem to so many such an anachronism also render him newly appealing as the apostle of a ...”

“... History Plays in 1944. They are highly dissimilar books, partly because Tillyard was, as he said, ‘no historian’ and because Lake is, as he says, ‘not a literary critic’, but also because of a long revolution of interpretative perspective. Tillyard set the revolution in train but it eventually displaced his thesis, and to Lake he seems a remote ...”