“... subtleties. She can look both dim and cunning, dreamy and on the make. Lubitsch’s biographer, Scott Eyman, wrote: ‘If it’s possible for an actress to believably play a character who sleeps her way to the top and still remains innocent, Negri manages to pull it off.’ Yet for all the compassion the audience feels for her, the film is about du Barry ...”

“... goes to parties and readings, comes across a copy shop and talks to the owner about Jewishness and Margaret Mead, drinks Campari and soda and dodges a one-night stand with a married man. As Sheila sinks into self-pity and boredom, so does her novel. (This must have been the point at which some critics threw the book across the room, if they hadn’t ...”

“... familiar (and also much vandalised) symbols of mid-20th-century British culture: Giles Gilbert Scott’s famous ‘K2’ telephone kiosk. There is, in fact, no direct evidence (beyond a tenuous similarity of shape) that Scott actually used the tomb as his model. But such is the power of the Soane legend that his ...”

“... is margarita, leading many commentators to assume that the child’s name was Margery or Margaret). He can’t even bring himself to say that she was his daughter, just that she was closer ‘than aunt or niece’. He is obsessed with his loss and has come to visit her grave. ‘Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere [a grassy plot]/My privy perle withouten ...”

“... There are​ people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore ...”

“... long predates the internet, as does the mentality and culture of fandom (he notes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fanatical supporter of the Princeton football team, to a point where he would call the coach to offer tactical advice, some of which may even have inspired a new tactic known as the ‘two-platoon system’ in the 1930s). But the internet ...”

“... about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and ...”

“... and belonged to a glittering group of gamblers, ravers, spendthrifts and eccentrics which included Margaret Thatcher, whose enterprise culture of the Eighties, with its poor view of poverty and failure, must have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely have ...”

“... this glove, I tell him. ‘Oh I used to have an apron,’ he says in a camp Cockney accent, ‘but Margaret won’t let me wear it’ – I laugh at this East End butcher’s Masonic joke. I go back to our place and begin opening the oysters. I hackle them open and lay them out – alive and violated – on a metal tray. I’m thinking they are a shade ...”

“... of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme de Charrière) by Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott – Mainwaring’s Mysteries is the product of long and deep digging in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. And in this dogged quest, she has been driven by motives quite as mixed and dark as anything in Eugène Sue’s sensational Mystères de ...”

“... a pension of $200 a month. The Petrov episode was possibly in Gorbachev’s mind when he first met Margaret Thatcher at Chequers on 16 December 1984. Thatcher’s papers minute what he told her: ‘Mr Gorbachev argued that if both sides continued to pile up weapons this could lead to accidents or unforeseen circumstances and with the present generation of ...”

“... answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps ...”

“... ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent biography of Samuel from 2017, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some ...”

“... scholars, traces these in detail. The erudite merchant Prosper Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was ...”

“... thing that ever happened to her. In his lavish and loving new book about Garland’s MGM years, Scott Brogan (who runs several websites devoted to her life and career) wonders whether she might have had an easier time of things, at MGM and beyond, had Frank lived longer.One of Frank Gumm’s singing partners said he had the most beautiful voice she had ever ...”