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“... of Sonny Bono’s Flintstone-style waistcoats) and a tissue jacket. What did that book cost? The price of a Styrofoam bucket of Starbucks coffee-type coffee? Moving, from Cape Goliard in 1971, still had the look: Joe Brainard illustrations and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard ...”

“... household, with a stern, distant mother who never hugged or kissed her; her beloved father, a jack-of-all-trades, was sidelined by illness during part of her childhood, which deprived him of a breadwinner’s authority. Emotional impoverishment was an even greater deprivation than lack of money. The sadness which would seep into her songs contained a ...”

“... one of the owners sold me a 17th-century Latin book on Druids that I couldn’t afford at half-price (‘rainy day special’, he explained). Higher-end bookshops offered incunabula and Aldines, first editions of Gibbon and Austen to discriminating buyers who had real money.If you didn’t, you could explore the riches available in public collections. New ...”

“... the County of Northampton’. The principal purpose of enclosure was to increase profits, but the price of ‘Improvement’ was the loss of the commons and waste grounds, which according to the Act ‘yield but little Profit’. It took until 1820 to bring the enclosure fully into effect (nearby Castor stayed unenclosed until 1898). Laxton in Nottinghamshire ...”

“... of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national ...”

“... time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was ...”

“... Nixon came to office as the friend of the hard Right and then turned turtle and imposed wage and price controls. The natural ally of corner-cutting businessmen, he emerged as the most progressive environmentalist since Teddy Roosevelt, pushing through a mass of anti-pollution legislation, creating the Environmental Protection Agency and showing an absolute ...”

“... Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, my country free!’ Perhaps surprisingly, Forrest did not play the libertarian Brutus, though this was for aesthetic rather than ideological reasons: by his standards it wasn’t a ...”

“... in the spacious porch, there is a plaster bas-relief of the Massacre of the Innocents. The asking price for the house was £1.2 million. The figure would have astonished Thomas Stevenson, who was described by one of his wife’s bridesmaids as a husband both ‘grave and scientific’. Their only child was born in the back room downstairs. His mother wrote to ...”

“... followed. And Berenson then embarked on his dramatic apprenticeship in buying and advising ‘Mrs Jack’ Gardner, resolved to stock Fenway Court ‘with only the greatest paintings in the world’. They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for ...”

“... suddenly became the source of loyal battalions ready to die for the Hanoverians and the Union Jack. Jacobite refugees who had settled in America almost unanimously rejected the revolution and fought for the king who had crushed them at Culloden. How was that possible? Some say that Jacobitism was always blindly authoritarian. Devine, on the other ...”

“... hate-bursts Roth could handle, employing his rhetorical ninja skills. Such Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the ...”

“... of British sailors lined up on the decks, in their crisp white uniforms, saluting the Union Jack, and apparently experienced some kind of Anglophile epiphany, from which he has not yet recovered. This story has often been related in the press here, but when I repeated it in Egypt people laughed. Mohamed, they said, may well have visited the docks and ...”

“... an irreversible disenchantment with the industry, portraying Prokosch, the producer (played by Jack Palance), as ‘simultaneously ruthless, vain, childish, arrogant, stupid, greedy, self-deluding’. After Le Mépris, Le Gai savoir and the work of the Dziga Vertov group seem inevitable. Dixon sees King Lear, which he observes ‘might arguably be ...”

“... Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as at an honest revelation. A later reaction may be fury, as at a betrayal. But ...”