“... in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What they had in common wasn’t just masochistic moodiness, though there’s plenty of that in her verse, but the same galvanic experience of being in the world, as if she too was plugged into the ‘immense réservoir ...”

“... lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid extremes; camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his ...”

“... credit crunch was: banks being too scared to lend to each other. In the very dry words of Mervyn King, the then governor of the Bank of England, Libor became ‘in many ways the rate at which banks do not lend to each other’. Euribor, the Eurozone version of Libor, is at the moment even worse, since in very many cases these banks would be more likely to ...”

“... baked beans, cling peaches and custard powder, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality’s harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more profitable ...”

“... a visit to the region at the urging of the writer Gregorio Marañón; shocked by the poverty, the king ordered the first road to be built. ‘Work went slowly,’ Baxter writes. ‘Spain seemed almost to prefer Las Hurdes in its primitive state. Marañón, a bullfight aficionado and cultural traditionalist, regarded it as Spain in its purest form, and even ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”

“... on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants. Less conventionally, he also lived with seven Degas paintings. In 1876 he bought four ballet pictures from the London branch of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French ...”

“... between history and fiction altogether – Hayden White, already criticised by Momigliano, is the King Charles’s Head here – becomes such a bugbear. Not so much because it looms large in the discipline, but because it threatens the integrity of one conjugation of literature and history with false proximity to another, deleterious one. This is an ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... Dancer from the Dance, George Whitmore’s Nebraska, Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... of blood, the subject of Yeats’s poem ‘The Rose Tree’ (1920), in which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, leading figures in the 1916 Dublin Rising, concur that ‘nothing but our own red blood/Can make a right Rose Tree.’ (Pearse had declared that it would take ‘the blood of the sons of Ireland to redeem Ireland’.) Yeats said in this same diary ...”

“... believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not for him). What I remember of that night and of subsequent public celebrations up to and including the Festival of Britain was the impact of floodlighting and the sense ...”