“... of objectionable material. A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had ...”

“... his third bottle of wine of the night. The precise date of his death isn’t known, though it may well have been 22 February, when he was last seen at the Napier.Johnson was an avid reader of newspapers. Among the correspondents to whom he meticulously relayed news from the Kent Evening Post and the Sheerness Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa ...”

“... in routing the French army on 30 April, then left the city again to defeat a Neapolitan army on 9 May. It was the first time Italian volunteer forces had beaten professional foreign armies in the field.The French sent reinforcements and attacked again in June with 30,000 men and 75 cannons. Under constant bombardment, and with great loss of life, the city ...”

“... Don’t mind if I do! But all this was still no substitute for live sport at the weekend. It may be that the featurelessness of lockdown time put more pressure on this weak spot or spot in the week. If the days are hard to tell apart, you’re more likely to feel the absence of something that used to differentiate week and weekend. But this can’t fully ...”

“... to live with her brother, Leo. Like Barney, she already knew she was gay: an early romance with May Bookstaver, ‘upright and a trifle brutal’, had convinced her of that. In France Stein began work on QED, a novel about Bookstaver, and she and Leo started buying up paintings – Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse. ‘Cézanne gave me a new feeling about ...”

“... his break with it, when it came, would be just as uncompromising. Whatever revolutionary ideals he may once have harboured were snuffed out as the 1970s dragged on and he grew distant from what he characterised as the ‘furtive mandarin Leninism’ at the New Left Review. He didn’t believe that theories based on the primacy of class and capital could ...”

“... the planet for several hundred thousand years, but she was at the top of the news bulletins in May 2013 when a set of footprints appeared on a beach in Happisburgh, north Norfolk. The prints were 850,000 years old, the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden ...”

“... with other people, including for a while in the 1930s a love triangle with the American poet May Sarton in the course of which Sarton transferred her affections from Julian to Juliette.Bashford seems unnecessarily exercised by the fact that previous generations didn’t always share values we take for granted today. She berates both Huxleys for ‘their ...”

“... Europe, Leopold had removed her from Miramar to confinement in the family’s castles. Leopold​ may have been unwilling to help maintain his sister and her husband in Mexico, but he was intent on creating what Steven Press has called a ‘rogue empire’ of his own. Driven by a sociopathic craving for wealth and power, Leopold wanted to be a despot, not a ...”

“... heroes’ who make up the Seat of Power. She doesn’t lack ferocity, however. ‘The donkey may not have fought in the famous and defining Liberation War, but the sticks and stones of Jidada would tell you that even with just her mouth alone she could do serious battle and slay.’ The sun symbolises the Old Horse’s grip on power; it only rises above ...”

“... at Lincoln’s Inn. (Donne and his younger brother, Henry, began their studies at Oxford, and may have spent time at Cambridge, but there was a law barring Catholics from formal admission to the ranks of either university.) At Lincoln’s Inn, Donne quickly established a reputation for himself, not as a carefully reared Catholic, but as a gifted (if ...”

“... never write ‘after they had had all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes’. He may have been right not to pry into the nooks and crannies of his own mind, since his remarkable capacity not to acknowledge what his writing was really about must have been part of what enabled him to produce it. In interviews he would act surprised when asked ...”

“... or ‘Alma Mahler called’), and some sentences could have come unchanged from a biography (‘In May they booked a hotel on the island of Brioni off the coast of Istria and took the overnight train from Munich to Trieste and then a local train’) or a helpful work of explication (‘In his invention of the twelve-tone system, Schoenberg had established the ...”

“... from the star system, withdrawal became – for a time – the definition of stardom. Groucho Marx may well have been the only insider to call her bluff. Encountering her one day in an elevator on the MGM lot, he lifted the brim of her hat to peer underneath: ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were a fella I knew from Kansas City.’Garbo made the ...”

“... as ‘a cutting-edge technology vital to our strategic leader development programme … We hope it may also be of interest to the British army.’It was not. A plan to continue Sale’s research by assessing cadets at Sandhurst was derailed when he lost access to military personnel gradings after leaving the army in 1995. As a civilian, Sale ran a consultancy ...”