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“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”

“... the beloved ‘best companion’ to whom she dedicated The Song of the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived in New York from 1913 to her death – we know next to nothing. The elusive Duse, one feels, would have approved. The same preference for austerity informs Acocella’s view of Cather and her ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”

“... now ambulance men ban kiss of life’; ‘Policeman flees Aids victim.’ In the early days, Michael Adler of Middlesex Hospital remembered, it was very difficult to get them hospitalised, it was very difficult to get patients treated as normal human beings. People were frightened, they thought it was contagious, the patients had to be put in side ...”

“... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...”

“... milder revisionism in favour of Native agency of Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground (2006) and Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations (2011).Shortly after​ the publication of Indigenous Continent, a dissenting review appeared in the Washington Post from a historian who was himself preparing a work on the same scale. Ned Blackhawk’s Rediscovery of ...”

“... break it, but only ‘in a specific and limited way’, as the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, assured Parliament. This strengthened the impression of the party’s newfound scepticism about domestic law (when the Supreme Court declared the 2019 prorogation illegal, Kwasi Kwarteng, a member of cabinet, announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but ...”

“... in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls ...”

“... his admiration for the ‘luminous brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He ...”

“... whose names were a constant struggle for her. ‘You know, darling the actor!’ she’d say of Michael Caine. ‘The curly-haired one who kills all the nignogs with the hay tutus and enormous spears in that film your father likes, I call him Alfie.’ She sold arrangements to Jean Shrimpton, Alec Guinness, Tony Blackburn, and others whose names she got ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”