“... it in Monte Carlo to Craigie Aitchison’s exhibition ... I immediately acquired a new admirer: Prince Rainier’s chamberlain, no less. He rang the gallery and asked, ‘Qui est cette fille délicieuse?’ and described the dress. Alors. Gradually, however, I found that, for myself at least, there was some point in puzzling over the diaries of Ossie ...”

“... under threat, but the historical certainties of Marxism lie undisturbed. ‘Broadly speaking,’ Peter Linebaugh tells us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the ...”

“... problems, such as those endured on the last of the Pink Panther movies. The CAA agent had got Peter Sellers three million dollars to do the film. He got Blake Edwards, who hated Sellers, the same amount (not to direct, but because he co-owned the rights). The agent also represented the scriptwriter, the director, and two of the producers. ‘It was about ...”

“... later etiquette books reveal the same disjunction between form and function). Like Machiavelli’s Prince, which tells princes how to adapt to circumstances, and shows readers that few if any princes ever do change their methods to meet new situations, The Courtier resembles a handbook. Like The Prince it is anything ...”

“... neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to my daughter and to me, going back even before I went at 15 to live in their house. When she died last November at the age of 94, I’d known Doris for fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never ...”

“... a huge leap from the ‘dauntless master’ of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to Peter Porter among the ‘takeaways’, ‘civic galleries’ and ‘cement escarpments’ of Rusholme. When the history of indebtedness comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a ...”

“... then. I’d forgotten his part in Lawrence of Arabia, but there he is again, this time as an Arab prince, perfectly plausible in a rather specialised movie sense of the term, and also perfectly his own poised multiple self. Lawrence of Arabia is at the other end of the scale from Brief Encounter, and is certainly the most interesting of the later films. The ...”

“... no attempt to assess his contribution to literature.* Yet this is to give us Hamlet without the prince. Darkness at Noon, which was first published in 1941, is one of the most talented, besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in ...”

“... grew up books-obsessed: as a 13-year-old she travelled to see Tolstoy to beg him not to kill off Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, then being serialised; she lost her nerve when she met him and just gave him a photo to sign. She got married when she was 18, to a judge, and moved to his estate in the provinces, but after ten years and three children she ...”

“... manipulating the whole situation?’ I said I didn’t know. ‘It’s Fortinbras, the crown prince of Norway, who takes over Denmark at the end. Horatio and the visiting players are in his employ: their mission is to tip Hamlet over the edge and foment conflict in Elsinore. Look at the play again. Hamlet’s father killed Fortinbras’s father, he has ...”

“... A place in society – harder for a painter to win in England than Paris – was established. The Prince of Wales came to parties at her house in Maddox Street and she said (there is evidence that she may again have exaggerated royal interest in her affairs) that it was he who arranged permission for her to stay when an edict issued after the breakdown of the ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... yet he can’t stop himself looking through someone’s record collection to find his favourite Prince LP. The Faber Book of Pop is especially good at capturing the impact of pop music, the inexplicable power of the right sound in the right place at the right time. Jon Savage and Hanif Kureishi have gathered more than a hundred and fifty pieces extracted ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”