“... was a schoolboy under Sir Roger Fulford. He puts one in mind of those Sloane Rangers who, so it is said, keep to their A-level texts at university to avoid intellectual fatigue. Yet, as against this, his is the first biography of the Prince to make what might be called both significant and candid use of the materials in the Royal Archives. He shows that a ...”

“... Finney), Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson) and A Patriot for Me (which, along with Edward Bond’s later Saved, can be credited with having brought about the end of theatre censorship). Moving through two further marriages in quick succession (to Mary Ure, who played his first wife in Look Back in Anger, then to Penelope Gilliatt, the film ...”

“... a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening. ‘Tell us this,’ he said, ‘are yez unionists or are yez not?’ At the centre of Auden’s work, an equally categorical question is implicit: ‘Tell us this, are yez civilised or are yez not?’You could be forgiven for feeling caught up in some private argument here, but there ...”

“... beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’ Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a ...”

“... wind). I didn’t recognise this as a warning that his brain was on the verge of collapse.It​ is said that the first lie of a map is that it tells the truth. The only true map would be on a scale of 1:1, a map that shows every single detail, including the map of the map of the map. Even supposing that such infinite regress could be shown (it can’t), the ...”

“... spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at it. Mrs Nelson had been the Catholic ...”

“... programme for developing the hydrogen bomb so enthusiastically promoted by his former colleague Edward Teller. That opposition, combined with continuing suspicion of his left-wing political affiliations before and during the war, led in 1954 to the AEC hearings, which resulted in the withdrawal of his security clearance. (Robert had flirted with joining the ...”

“... push him into actions more heroic than himself.’I picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’I got up CNN on my phone. ‘Loud bangs heard at rally; Trump whisked away with blood on face,’ the headline said. It ...”

“... offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its limits, pretty innocent ...”

“... was positive. It would soon be a done deal, they insisted. That Friday, when the announcer said the Agreement had been signed, I felt a sort of cold hope: I remembered Sunningdale, the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, the collapse of the Power-Sharing Executive in 1974. At seven that evening, we reached the house of the friend we were staying with on Lough ...”

“... much of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise incapacitated ‘during the composition of the said work’. (Presumably nothing had, in fact, to be repaid, since John Forster recorded that 50,000 copies were sold ‘while ...”

“... Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of the language in his ‘Proposals for Correcting the English Tongue’ (1712) and elsewhere, hoping that ‘some method ...”

“... on their spiritual significance and indeed tells us what the Renaissance really meant. ‘I said just now that Signor Crespi’s portrait’ – a painting of a lady now in the National Gallery in London and agreed to be a Titian, but proposed by Berenson as a copy of a Giorgione – had a certain family resemblance to the one of the former Doetsch ...”

“... bearded ... rather shabby’ artist himself. Indeed, one might say of Lawrence, as Keats said of Shakespeare, that he ‘led a life of Allegory. His works are the comments on it.’ To the cultural historian, Lawrence’s almost allegorical charisma is of special interest because both his popular and his critical reputation have fluctuated so ...”

“... Matisse’s mysterious Persian Woman; Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Print; a photograph of Edward Lane in Persian costume; André Derain’s L’Age d’or, a pointillist scene of nude women in an unspecified exotic setting. There was something extraordinary about the notion that the museum might bring these Orientalist visions to Tehran, turning the ...”