“... foe in Soviet communism. Buckley strutted the campus as a full-time anti-communist impresario. Robert Silvers, a Yale contemporary who later became the editor of the New York Review of Books, told Tanenhaus that Buckley ‘was so superior, so commanding’. He kept an aeroplane near the campus and employed a secretary to assist him as editor of the Yale ...”

“... A scene from a concert: on stage, a young Jewish-American folk singer/ songwriter, accompanied only by his own guitar and the harmonica around his neck, with a forceful, nasal voice and impeccable comic timing, is singing – or half-reciting, half-improvising – a talking blues. The object of his satire is the paranoid and xenophobic response of some of his fellow Americans to the threat posed by a sinister and nebulous enemy from the other side of the world ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... her father in Epping Forest. Poor Cibber handed over his money, making only the rueful reproof: ‘Young man, young man! This is a sorry trade. Take heed in time.’ ‘And so I would,’ replied his disguised daughter, ‘but I’ve a wicked hunks of a father, who rolls in money, yet denies me a guinea. And so a worthy ...”

“... a lot of inarticulate Morrisite touchy-feely heart-felt good intentions. Led by NLR, the young (and would-be young) theory-brokers undertook a massive injection of Benjamin, Brecht, Lacan, Althusser, Balibar, Gramsci and Macherey into the Anglo-Saxon intellectual system. On one level, the operation has been ...”

“... of European socialism, these rumpled figures, whom it was impossible to imagine had ever been young, provoked awed attention in some students and light-hearted mockery in others. For those who attended, there was an aura of mystery and suffering about these postwar refugees, who had lost country, family and possessions, and suffered multiple ...”

“... to have established a lasting reputation along the Nile, because it was by those shores that the young Mohammed Al Fayed eagerly turned its pages and developed, as he says, an indelible affection for British ways. Four years after the 151-year-old magazine folded, the Harrods pharaoh revived the title on a budget which, according to the author of this ...”

“... of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ‘proliferation of hordes of infants, children, youths and young men and women on the unpaved and unlit streets of the smoky, industrial “frontier” towns’ – frenetically expending what energy they could muster before life closed in on them. Things could only get better. Despite the forcefulness of Edwin Chadwick ...”

“... films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout his book, Stubbs is unusually attentive to the musical content of screen comedy, and he ...”

“... block where Louise, played by Pascale Ogier, lives with her architect boyfriend. We watch the young woman as she walks up and down the stairs in her apartment, with its unframed Mondrian prints hanging on the wall, tennis rackets in one corner, fabrics, paints and plants in another. Nothing is rushed in this opening: we are simply encouraged, as ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... in 1645, he rolled up the enemy flank in a brilliantly controlled style – anticipating the young Napoleon, all the more remarkably since Cromwell had never been to a military academy or, as far as we know, read a book on strategy (or any book much except the Bible). His insistence on speed was also Napoleonic: ‘Hasten your horses, you must act ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... of one of the most compelling documents a historian can hold – the love letter. Mary Hewitt, the young wife of a Coventry lawyer, kissed his letters when he was away and invited him to imagine her a Woman of Feeling languishing for want of him: post days are all sunshine when we are to have a letter [in the] morning … I find a secrett pleasure ye night ...”

“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”