“... to the exercise of compassion). The need for sympathy in human relations had been central to George Eliot’s intensely moral interpretation of what art can do for us: ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies,’ she wrote in her 1856 essay on ‘The Natural History of German ...”

“... review, signing a letter to Van Vechten, ‘Yours, for further violation of hospitality, or as George Gershwin (wasn’t it) put it Do it again.’ The ethnography of Harlem in Van Vechten’s daybooks is more valuable than the fiction he produced. Recording feuds, trysts and hangovers, they also provide the most detailed account we have of Larsen’s life ...”

“... cryste (1517) declares: ‘This boke Inprinted at London in Fletestrete at the signe of the George by Richard Pynson Prynter unto the Kynges noble grace,’ so the building was probably hung with the sign of George and the Dragon. As I enter the lobby of the current occupiers, Legalease, the security guard ...”

“... picked by de Valera – led by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith – negotiated with Lloyd George and Churchill. It was the treaty that led to partition and Collins was fully aware that it would provoke a crisis for Sinn Fein and the IRA. Little in Coogan’s rendering of the convoluted story of the treaty is new (he has himself been over this ...”

“... patron, Frederick, Prince of Wales, the artists Hogarth and Hayman, the designers Gravelot and George Michael Moser, the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac and the composers Arne and Handel: ‘The brash light-heartedness, the unwillingness to follow rules, the energy, informality and experimentation that were intrinsic to Vauxhall are all typical of the ...”

“... unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a moment when the British were much preoccupied with reconsidering their past. In particular, in the wake of Catholic emancipation and with the Oxford ...”

“... briefly by an unregarded few. And so it comes about that the Victorians – Browning, no less than George Eliot – are back in favour, not just for their undemanding and verbally profligate forms but for their portentous preoccupation: how to lose religious faith and yet preserve all the psychological comforts which that faith had afforded. More than a ...”

“... and the Restless – has once appeared as himself. So, too, has Henry Kissinger. At a charity ball in Denver, Joan Collins wafts up to Kissinger with the greeting: ‘Henry, I haven’t seen you since Portofino.’ In the most far-reaching words of his distinguished career. Kissinger replies: ‘That’s right.’ Now, in the footsteps of the royals and ...”

“... Second World War version of the old army song ‘Colonel Bogey’, that ‘Hitler has only got one ball,’ the notes of the Soviet forensic pathologist who examined the Führer’s remains in 1945 recorded that ‘the left testicle could not be found.’ The same could be said, however, of most of Hitler’s body, which was burned by his orderlies after his ...”

“... brown hat, shaded by one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous ...”

“... prototype is William Webb Ellis of Rugby School, who playing football one afternoon picked up the ball and ran with it. A fox of genius surprises again and again by the speed and wonder of his inventiveness. These speculations have come in the wake of seeing an exhibition at the Tate Liverpool of a British sculptor in mid-career who is surely an artist of ...”

“... tasted English beer and porter in greater abundance’. We even hear about the subscription ball, where Country Boamkin, as they call Country Bumkin, is a very favourite dance, tho’ they make it quite different from the dance so called in England. The supper is very elegant, but so much in fashion is everything English that Beefstakes, Welsh Rabits ...”

“... see no particular virtue in photographic accuracy. Joyce could learn nothing from Thackeray or George Eliot. The point of literature was to transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power ...”

“... and being swanky, at the Ritz. But I really like the first part best.’ In a photo taken at a ball in March, Roselyne Béghin, of the sugar fortune, and Sabine de Noailles, whose aunt’s grandmother inspired Proust, are caught mid-chat, eyes closed and mouths open in exclamation, but Bouvier, in a black strapless dress and triple-stranded pearls, manages ...”

“... firing standard steel balls into London telephone directories. According to the page at which a ball had stopped they could calculate how much energy it had lost when penetrating the target. They went from telephone books to human flesh, borrowing what Zuckerman called ‘anatomical material taken from, and returned to, a hospital post-mortem room’. The ...”