“... In 1980 Ronald Syme in the London Review denounced it as a hoax. There is a Penguin translation by Anthony Birley, called Lives of the Later Caesars. To dip into it is rather like finding old newspapers under the lino, from 1956 or 1968, say, with time-serving editorials, eulogies of American Presidents, moralising news-stories by journalists missing the ...”

“... writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family – Burgess was driven to the expedient ...”

“... Portrait Gallery has a fine snapshot (taken by Colin Matthew) of the architectural historian Howard Colvin in the ruins of Godstow Abbey: spectacles pushed up on his forehead, camera dangling from one hand, he looks down intently as he makes a neat entry in the notebook he has just fished from his pocket. I have always been impressed by those academics ...”

“... uncertainty seemed elemental, and he was more absorbing than Famous Actors like Olivier, Brando or Anthony Quinn. But there hasn’t been a book, a Life to hold on to, a place to bring questions – and worries. Now, all at once, there are two of them, and I must warn you, you need both.There have been books before, some of them opportunist, some earnest and ...”

“... at least) a slew of critical histories of his father, James VI and I, and his decadent court. Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of James as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ has stuck, as has his unflattering ...”

“... Rochester had no objection to collaboration because he contributed a scene to a play by Sir Robert Howard, a scene which, if the play had ever been finished or played, would almost certainly not have been acknowledged, and he put more effort into a collaboration with the long-dead poet John Fletcher than into anything else he ever did. In ‘Lucina’s ...”

“... about having lied to American officials for two years about Pakistan’s aid to the Taliban, and Anthony Lake, the US national security adviser from 1993 to 1997, who lets it be known that he thought the CIA director James Woolsey was ‘arrogant, tin-eared and brittle’. Woolsey was so disliked by Clinton that when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a ...”

“... attract or offend which particular audience. And ultimately there was no choice. An original like Howard Hawks could defy the odds with Scarface and His Girl Friday, but a personal ‘signature’, too, becomes a formula in the end, and Red River gives way to Rio Bravo and Rio Lobo. To step seriously out of the groove of the big studios condemned a director ...”

“... but the chapters themselves unassigned; my guess is that the survey of the queer scene is by Anthony Blond, also the book’s publisher. Its tone is both hip and cagey, totally au fait with bars, clubs and cruising spots that the writer cannot yet name: it’s a tantalising guide, innuendo just short of the really useful statement. On the north side of ...”

“... home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days to ...”

“... looked uncannily like the jurisdiction exercised on behalf of the pope by Wolsey. The historian Anthony Shaw has traced the progress of this vicegerential visitation in a miniature masterpiece of detection, reconstructing its dynamics month by month – and demonstrating that such reconstruction is eminently possible. It all led up to parliamentary ...”

“... by Blair’s Cool Britannia, as well as by the phoney radicalism of the US neo-conservatives. What Anthony Giddens labelled the ‘runaway world’ of postmodern capitalism was partly devoted to running away from democracy, notably at home. This was accomplished by coupled strategies of reaction: a resanctification of principles that have stood the Test of ...”

“... Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have fitted a vast ...”

“... male philosophers who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has ...”

“... the room. 13 June. At supper Alec Guinness tells a curious story apropos of a BBC documentary on Anthony Eden last night. In prewar days Eden used to see a good deal of the theatre director Glen Byam Shaw and when he was contemplating resignation over Abyssinia in 1938 he sought Byam Shaw’s advice. Byam Shaw said that his advice wasn’t worth having as he ...”