“... a myth to meet the needs of empire, which endured as empires fell.Like his one-time colleague Howard Carter, Weigall was a child when Britain invaded Egypt in 1882. But unlike Carter, who kept on digging through the First World War, Weigall had given up archaeology for a writer’s life in England. He produced books on ancient Egypt, a few adventure ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... way of working. He simply didn’t know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer on Citizen Kane, describes what it ...”

“... partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a resented necessity for the inhabitants ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... in his disenchantment with this freedom. Little wonder, since his life, pleasingly chronicled by Richard Vanderbeets, began in St Petersburg amid aristocratic Anglo-Russian relatives whose licensed eccentricities would have spoiled anyone for Hollywood. ‘From his great carved bed’ – this was a favourite uncle at play – ‘a .22 calibre pistol in his ...”

“... they will in time subvert the whole notion of what it is to be a scholar, a teacher or a student. Richard Altick called his 1960 guide for the aspiring student The Scholar Adventurers. The tiro entering the British Museum or the Widener could picture himself as Richard Burton going into darkest Africa. It was an ennobling ...”

“... excluded from the New Deal and Fair Deal. White anger later found a grim and calculating ally in Richard Nixon, with his ‘Southern strategy’, his appeals to the ‘silent majority’ and his calls for ‘law and order’ in America’s cities.Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised ...”

“... the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other British travellers and expatriates in the city. This led him to ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... without political interference. It would have sixty staff, the then home secretary, Michael Howard, announced in 1995, ‘about three times the number currently engaged in such work’, who would ‘reflect the broad mix of legal, investigative and administrative skills and experience needed’. It would have twelve commissioners, three of whom had to ...”

“... be a biographical dictionary of an array of fictional characters from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had ...”

“... give his compliments a sharper second edge, as for example in ‘To My Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, on His Excellent Poems’ (Howard later became his brother-in-law). Discussing Howard’s translation of Book IV of the Aeneid, Dryden says: Elisa’s griefs are so expressed by ...”

“... the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”