“... The elder brother quickly turned into a young dandy. One of the funniest photos Lartigue ever took was of Zissou in the boating pool at Rouzat in 1911. Zissou is sitting in a ‘rubber pocket’, a recent invention (not his) for duck hunters. It consists of a fat inner tube onto which are moulded a pair of rubber legs, dimly present below the surface of ...”

“... Hollis, also out of a job, created his best-known and most widely disseminated work: the cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the book that accompanied the documentary series. (Berger had taught Hollis drawing as a student, and Hollis also designed a striking jacket for his novel G.) The first episode opened with Berger wielding a Stanley knife in ...”

“... chairmanship of the group helped salve his conscience. Benn was less at ease when the contest took place in the autumn and he found himself humiliated, winning just 11 per cent of the electoral college, thereby cementing Kinnock in the post. He felt let down by the unions, which had encouraged him to stand and then failed to support him. This sequence of ...”

“... On​ 28 September 1992, the artist and London nightclub impresario Leigh Bowery took the stage at Kinky Gerlinky, a peripatetic club then established in Leicester Square. Wearing sunglasses, a headscarf and a striped cotton dress, the imposing Bowery had got himself up as Divine – his most obvious precursor – in John Waters’s film Female Trouble (1974 ...”

“... she was determined, now, to inhabit only incongruous places, her disinterested career in the world took her to work in a local ballroom, one of a chain which operates throughout the provinces.’ At the end of the book, she lies dead in her gas-filled room, ‘a painted doll, bluish at the extremities’. This is surely a lot of masquerade ...”

“... which it might not otherwise have roused. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (the murdered man). Sir John Henry (‘Jock’) Delves Broughton (the presumed murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s ...”

“... long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that. The scarlet Woolsack, described by John Wells as ‘a sofa sacred to the law’, plays a sit-on part throughout this book. Though periodically restuffed with Commonwealth wool, it retains all the ‘ritual magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on which ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... refuges for repentant prostitutes or bankrupted merchants. Shortly before his death in 1791, John Wesley looked back on the century as one in which ‘benevolence and compassion toward all the forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.’ Not everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially ...”

“... cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in the two 1974 elections. He wasn’t standing in Southall in the hope of securing a high vote, but because the NF thought putting up a candidate there would get them publicity. On 23 April, 2875 police ...”

“... In 1830 the prophet John Wroe asked his congregation of Christian Israelites in Ashton-under-Lyne for seven virgins to serve in his household. The Israelites had already built a Sanctuary and four gatehouses at Ashton, in the belief that the Lancashire cotton town was to be the site of the New Jerusalem. Mr Wroe got his virgins, but less than a year later he was almost lynched by his flock after the church elders had acquitted him on charges of indecency ...”

“... Trevor’s Tom and David Profumo’s James are simply – or not quite simply – innocents. John Fuller’s Hugh Howard, in Tell it me again, is much older – in his late forties – but acceptably an innocent abroad. Abroad is America. Hugh is an English composer, talented and successful, but a bit of a cold fish. In this sense, Fuller’s is another ...”

“... drink(s) in exchange for a mint copy of Giles Goatboy, or of swopping some multi-volume reissue of John Cowper Powys for a night out on the town. The Chancery Lane idea is (or used to be) that you can sell off review copies for half their published price. The books had to be in really good condition (hence the loving care with which one would sometimes see a ...”

“... back to their places, for they were aware that it was his rough hand that packed them up and took them to rehearsals. ‘What!’ he cried. ‘Rebelling again, are you? Just wait! Pretty soon they’re going to put out Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, and then I should like to see which one of you can move a limb or a key.’   ‘Oh no! Not ...”

“... was: ‘Gentlemen, the Times is printed – by steam.’ The year was 1814; the proprietor was John Walter II; the new technology was the Koenig steam-driven press capable of over a thousand impressions an hour, against the 250 impressions which was all the old Stanhope iron press could manage; and his tactic of secrecy and confrontation (he was frightened ...”