“... raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There ...”

“... if he would let me use his cellar, which I imagined would be totally dark, to cure the fault. He took me down to the cellar, but it had two small windows, and when I emerged a few minutes later, explaining that unfortunately it was not dark enough for my purpose, he seemed slightly offended: so his cellar wasn’t good enough. He handed us our drinks rather ...”

“... I’m not.) Fifteen minutes on the News at Ten and a memorial pull-out in every paper was all it took for Bowie, not two days dead, to be resurrected as a national treasure. Never mind that he had turned down a knighthood, and refused to take part in the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony (‘Heroes’ echoed around the stadium as the British athletes paraded ...”

“... places to buy its sacraments and phylacteries; bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to ...”

“... bursaries, but his advisers also wanted evidence of skill. One of them, however, suggested he see John Reed. Reed was a solicitor, interested in Modernism. He lived with his wife Sunday in a house called Heide, in Heidelberg, a semi-rural community outside Melbourne – it had given its name to the Heidelberg School of Australian painters in the late 19th ...”

“... bridge over the river; until at last you get to Roscommon town, somewhere you might have heard of. John McGahern’s new novel demands a kind of triangulation if you’re to make sense of it. Carrick-on-Shannon is (perhaps) a short drive away; in the other direction you’ll get to Longford in a while. If you don’t try to make sense of it, the barely ...”

“... was published in 1922 in the collection Tristia. When it was reprinted in 1928, however, the poet took out both references to the ‘Soviet night’, and revised the poem in the interests of discretion and concealment. The Soviet night was indeed about to descend. It is difficult to overemphasise both the gravity and the simplicity entailed on Mandelstam’s ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... books published to mark the opening of the new galleries supports this view of Turner’s genius. John Gage ends his introduction with a remark made by Lawrence Gowing in 1966: ‘It is not certain that we are yet prepared to see Turner whole.’ Gage reckons it is time to renew the attempt. He uses another quotation from Gowing to epitomise the Modernist ...”

“... he spoke, all the way down to the contraction of his eyebrows. In one sense, then, the fact that John Major’s father spent thirty years in music hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their ...”

“... all children over three years old, and the banning of corporal punishment (recommendations that took, respectively, twenty and thirty years to implement). When he was putting together the questionnaire for the 1958 cohort, Butler decided at the last minute to ask whether mothers had smoked during pregnancy. In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill’s ...”

“... skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more traditional father-figure type of politician, a man who emphasised the private qualities of life and spoke ...”

“... trauma, breakdown came up more and more in her columns, and then the Guardian sacked her. I took to looking at her Twitter sometimes, and I saw grim stuff on it that I can’t check now, because a day or two after Deborah’s death her posts – ‘her support network and her playground,’ in the words of her great friend Suzanne Moore ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”