“... of those outstanding biographies which have the deeper and wider resonance of a novel’: Christopher Booker), A.N. Wilson tells a funny anecdote about Mussolini that was new to me, though I had just finished Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini. It runs: ‘Mussolini had in fact modelled his style of dress on that of his ...”

“... ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’. The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to ...”

“... a cartoon vehicle for Pamela Anderson, did. Lee’s relationship with JC, whom his friend Kevin Smith was by this time describing as ‘the worst fucking human being in the world’, became more and more destructive. Between Joan’s death in 2017 and his own a year later, Lee disappeared into an opaque muddle of unsteady public appearances and claims and ...”

“... a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from Camberwell. Forester had encouraged a younger writer, Dudley Pope, to make a play for his vast readership once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American ...”

“... Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the Eye) in the Standard. Nor are the paper’s smallest ...”

“... The book gathered a buzz, went to America, won a prize from the Believer, then in 2008 Zadie Smith wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, in tandem with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Smith immediately got the point of the McCarthy project, its vehemence, its attack on the plushy poshlust of what she called ...”

“... A fathead is stupid but a fat cheque is welcome. A fat chance is smaller than a slim chance. Christopher Forth begins his inquiries at the most visceral level, by considering responses to the substance of fat both in and out of the body. It is, he suggests, the capacity of fat to be both in and out that contributes to the widely varying attitudes to ...”

“... Practically the first anecdote in his book recounts an attempt to get his under-age eldest son Christopher considered for a short-service commission in the Army. A mixture of barrack-room lawyer arguments and military name-dropping achieves his objective and Christopher gets onto the course which leads eventually, by way ...”

“... as a supposedly discrete syndrome. The trial of Oscar Wilde is cited, most recently by Christopher Breward, as a turning point after which any deviation in male clothes was seen as simply deviant. Like the French Revolution argument, this is surely only a partial truth. For whatever reason, however, it is true that the average heterosexual ...”

“... invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by the family butler. Her long liaison with the darkly romantic Alexander Kerensky, which began in cloak-and-dagger circumstances in New York, was only one of many points at which her lifeline touched major public ...”

“... No one seems to be missing. And there’s no shortage of ambient sound. Songs collected by Harry Smith for the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) drift on the air in the first rooms; in the last, we can hear Paul Bowles’s recordings (1959-61) of traditional Moroccan musicians. Beaubourg’s trophy exhibit is Kerouac’s highway-scroll manuscript of On ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”

“... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...”

“... put it, sallied forth for some amber fluid. Turning to a couple of leaner collections is a relief. Christopher Burns’s 14 pieces demonstrate a very assured, inventive, hard-edged, rather cold talent, playing some Post Modernist tricks (‘How things are put together’, ‘Dealing in Fictions’, both of which smell a little of the creative-writing ...”

“... her in steering a course away from her own mother’s demands. Strachey’s mother, Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic ...”