“... 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 ...”

“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different elements with neutrons in the hope that absorption of neutrons by their atomic nuclei would generate new radioactive elements. On irradiating the heaviest known elements, uranium and thorium, Fermi did indeed find radioactivities not ascribable to any known elements; he attributed some of ...”

“... six-month journey via Rhodes and Athens, but stayed outside the sacred boundary of the city in the hope of being granted a formal triumph. He was, once again, disappointed. By now, Pompey and Caesar had broken with each other: in 50, Pompey, after much vacillation, had sided with senatorial hardliners in demanding that Caesar lay down his command and return to ...”

“... apologetics for liberal society. We need an apologetics for liberalism which revolves around the hope that culture as a whole can be ‘aestheticised’ rather than around the Enlightenment hope that it might be ‘scientised’. Liberal politics is best suited to a culture whose hero is the strong poet rather than the ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...”

“... other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”