“... who reigned over London high society between the wars; arranging debutante balls for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer ...”

“... Birnam Wood, with its increasingly violent implications and its ambitious, destructive characters, may misdirect but doesn’t deviate from its plotted path. ‘This is me leaving. I’m leaving Birnam Wood,’ Shelley informs her ex-best friend the morning after a catastrophic communal acid trip, the beginning of the novel’s spiral to its end. ‘I am ...”

“... His decision to buy the Aranda (now in the Frick Pittsburgh, the museum’s sister institution) may have been sparked by his first visit to Europe, undertaken the previous year with Andrew Mellon, who would go on to form another of the great American art collections of the early 20th century. If Frick’s trip to Europe opened his eyes to the possibilities ...”

“... in Abadan. (He suggests that the Scottish manager of the oil-linked Imperial Bank of Persia may have been responsible for introducing football to Iran.) In the 1950s Anglo-Persian became British Petroleum. As well as increasing its refining capacity, Grangemouth became the site of Europe’s first petrochemicals plant, commissioned in 1951. Workers ...”

“... known as “Bee”,’ it begins. Bee’s biography, related in the second section of the story, may be fraudulent. Its author insists that the post we are reading is one of many different versions; the discrepancies between them obscure the truth of any one account. Whoever Bee is, her project is a flight from the indignity of identification. She is ...”

“... of Saxony for the hurly-burly of Polish and Lithuanian politics. Blanning suggests that Augustus may have been swayed by an old prophecy about a Saxon prince who would become king of Poland and recapture Constantinople from the Turks, before welcoming the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. But such prognostications were just part of princely display, to be ...”

“... at night with a spray can. White is direct, frank and unsensational about his homosexuality, which may well be a key to understanding his work and his life. He grew up in a wealthy family, comfortable, accustomed to servants (English and Scots) to whom he felt attached, undisturbed (he says), but nevertheless driven in on himself, by the early recognition of ...”

“... of those cunts have lived up there. What about the fucking Soho Vikings, eh ... And so on. It may not look much on the page, and has perhaps been imperfectly transcribed (Sayle’s-pace is about fifteen words a second) – but think how enfeebled it would be without the ‘dirt’. As Rick Mayall (on the Comic Strip bill as one half of a duo called ...”

“... hand, it is quietly and consistently funny, and so full of Powell’s characteristic note that it may help us to see what that note is. Let’s start with what seems to be a difficulty. The book is written in a blurred prose which is the stylistic equivalent of talking with marbles in your mouth. He early expressed the conviction, a tenable one, that he ...”

“... like the landscape he traversed, but he rises easily to comparisons with writers whom he may never have read. He does not know everything – though where did he learn his Latin? – but he listens with an intellectual’s sensitivity to historical nuance, and this is rare in America, even in academic circles. Surely not more than one Missourian in a ...”

“... Bey, a pair of Tweedledum/dee seducers with the scantiest emotional range. The heart of the novel may be pretty soft, but in other parts it is alive and comically ...”

“... were as sound as a Bow bell. He could not find it in himself to dislike the upper classes: ‘They may be an abuse, but they are often as like as not intelligent and amusing.’ But he couldn’t stand the middle classes. This clarity of definition surrounds the man and his policies, as well as the challenges which faced him, and the West, at the time. Imagine ...”

“... of the Christian Religion, perhaps the dominant work of the established Reformation. The reasons may lie simply in the close-knit ties of Renaissance intellectual life. Not only Calvin and Zwingli but Erasmus, Vesalius and Montaigne have walk-on parts in the Platter saga, and Paracelsus, Scaliger and Bandello are only just offstage. The 14-year-old Felix ...”

“... record beyond recovery. Neville-Sington stuffs the gaps with speculation (‘must have’, ‘may have’ and ‘probably’ feature too often) and with appropriate, and often voluminous, quotation from Trollopian fiction (Fanny’s, Anthony’s and Thomas’s). It’s clearly a faute de mieux, but it works well as such. She has given us a Fanny for our ...”

“... Cook or John Prescott or Margaret Beckett, as they did for Blair. The extent of last year’s May landslide is itself proof of the extraordinary shift in popular opinion. The huge majority was not expected or sought by the New Labour leader. They know that at least part of it reflected something much more fundamental than a change in Labour Party ...”