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“... themselves, or those nearest them, could be in danger, too. But who set the Germans this example? Tom Bower’s answer is unequivocal. British officials, and to a lesser extent American policies, permitted German concentration-camp gaolers, SS and Gestapo members, lawyers who had administered Nazi law, bureaucrats and industrialists who had supported Hitler ...”

“... to follow. Roe knew Coryate quite well. They had first met in England, in the courtly ambit of Henry, Prince of Wales, and Coryate had been loosely attached to the Embassy since Roe’s arrival in India two years previously. The Ambassador had an ambivalent attitude to this eccentric but deeply experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the ...”

“... Tom Wolfe​ lived round the corner from the Metropolitan Museum, at 21 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison. A mahogany elevator went to the sitting room of his 14th-floor apartment, much as it does to Sherman McCoy’s in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe’s ‘Master of the Universe’ – who could be Jeffrey Epstein – soon brings ignominy to his marble halls, but he never commits the basic crime of not knowing how wonderful his Upper East Side spread is ...”

“... to the barrier around the demesne. The Paisley of this period is partly modelled on the Rev. Henry Cooke, a reactionary and highly influential 19th-century preacher who did much to counter Presbyterian radicalism. This Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his ...”

“... of exile. Field Day’s leading directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Tom Paulin – are literary kings over the water or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration.The novelist Colm Toibin said in his Sunday Independent review of the Field Day Anthology: ‘Unreconstructed Irish nationalists ...”

“... should be called African. Mark Twain himself maintained that Huck Finn was based on a lad called Tom Blankenship, a poor-white outcast son of the town drunk of Hannibal. This opens up various possibilities. Perhaps Tom talked like Jimmy, or, indeed, Jimmy talked like Tom – we can never ...”

“... and less than half of that was kept in the revised version, which runs for an hour and a half. As Tom Charity remarks in his critical biography of Cassavetes, ‘Mekas’s “spontaneous cinema” had no sooner been recognised than it was reconsidered.’ For Faces, which runs a little over two hours, Cassavetes shot around 150 hours of film. That’s an ...”

“... in the early Tudor period: ‘it must have been clear to perceptive Englishmen, perhaps even to Henry [VIII], that all this [power and greatness] had gone for ever. A shrunken, post-imperial England faced an uncertain future on the margins of a Europe now dominated by the great powers.’ In what sense was England already ‘post-imperial’ by 1523, one ...”

“... lack of corroboration from any European chronicle that eventually – and much to the annoyance of Henry VII – put an end to Arthur-based claims of ancient seniority for English kings.As for the many modern attempts to make sense likewise of Nennius’s list of battles, by identifying place-names and trying to construct a plausible campaign history, Higham ...”

“... for something less claustrophobic. From the point in the story where Emily and Louisa (who married Tom Conolly, said to be the richest man in Ireland) settled in their new homes, Carton and Castletown respectively, we get reports of everything that went on in these two houses and their parks. Nearly twenty pages are given up to what, in content, could be a ...”

“... virtues of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn ...”

“... rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey building on Main Street, where the thugs of his Ready-Mixed Cement Corporation were dispatched to buy votes, steal ballot boxes, kidnap candidates or gun down ...”

“... would be too emotionally extravagant to produce a man like Major. (There are photos of his father, Tom, looking like a cross between George Formby and Norman Wisdom, in the book.) What his parents did bequeath him, however, was a consuming interest in popular entertainment, which this lucid, erudite study distils to excellent effect. An impressive amount of ...”

“... dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James thought that Lang was too ‘insular and innocent’ to appreciate Paris). But he could only afford to be interested in a topic for the time it took to dash off an article about it. As Oxonian contemporaries racked up professorships, he became an aged ...”

“... I didn’t learn much history at Eton, but one of the first things we were taught was that Henry VI founded Eton, his “College Roiall of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way ...”