“... very next chapter Marjorie rewards him from beyond the grave with £5000 and the Alfa. Try as he may, Benson can’t avoid falling for Greg as easily as Sadie; nor can he avoid making Marjorie into something a good deal worse than an old bat, a PLOP, or Plucky Old Person. Reading about her past, you realise she was doomed to become one; it is a past filled ...”

“... but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building took this form ...”

“... to cancel itself out, to vanish up its own arsehole as he himself might have put it. That, too, may have been deliberate. His novels self-destruct on every page, consuming in their own energy like the schadenvoll German films of the period – Caligari or Mabuse. Even The Revenge for Love, arguably his masterpiece, and compared by Symons with Koestler’s ...”

“... stress to excel as her father’s hostess and perhaps was nicer than she sounds (as even Lizzie may have been). We should bear in mind that a niece is not on oath to her aunt. Apparently Isabella half-hoped to see her letters published and wondered whether to introduce ‘some bursts of fine writing’, an indulgence best left to Viceroys. John Keay, the ...”

“... by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to help him with theoretical work on the project. Nine years later Fuchs ...”

“... only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know in 1957 was the very active role that many of the academics I knew had played in creating the bomb. At Harvard, Norman Ramsey had been involved in selecting the plane that delivered the bomb over Japan. He also ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... stayed there, but he was determined to distinguish himself. Cranborne was quite the opposite. By May 1915 he had developed ringing noises in one ear which saw him invalided home. While Crookshank and Macmillan, who had both been seriously injured, were being passed ready to return to the front line, Cranborne was passed fit only for ‘light duties’, which ...”

“... goals. He was ‘cynically realistic’, Patterson writes, in his pursuit of ‘real ideals’. He may have been ruthless, but in a corrupt world it was better to trample legislative tradition and get bills through than, as Long said, ‘sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ’em die’. Patterson acknowledges Long’s reputation as a ...”

“... obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to ...”

“... presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician Robert-Houdin. An account can be found in his Memoirs: I borrowed from my noble spectators several handkerchiefs which I made into a parcel and laid on the table. Then at my request different persons wrote on the cards the names of the places whither they ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”

“... to South Africa? So it’s that bad? My translator’s brother is an apiarist in Plovdiv. He may not be an apiarist much longer, though, because this year all his bees have been born without wings. Without wings? ‘It is a mutation.’ What causes it? ‘We do not know.’ Other apiarists have found the same. Chernobyl? ‘We do not know.’ In Bulgaria ...”