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“... even had Clark been travelling by plane. Soon after posting the letter he began an affair with Barbara Desborough. Later, he was mentioned in her divorce proceedings and she came to London to be near her lover. Mutual friends had to sprinkle cold water on her optimistic ardour.Stourton deals briskly with the plight of ...”

“... Harry Hyams, Charles Clore, Jack Profumo, Lord Dilhorne, George Weidenfeld, Maurice Oldfield, Victor Rothschild, Lord Porchester, Andrew Parker Bowles: ideally they should be highlighted in bold type, as was the way in the Hickey column. The author lets us know a little about each. Mountbatten may have had an affair with ...”

“... itself was immortalised in Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1862, and the oldest French veteran, Louis-Victor Baillot – a conscript – was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. In 1904, 100,000 people attended the official opening of the Wounded Eagle memorial to the French combatants. The nation that gave the world democracy had democratised one of the worst days ...”

“... what St Anne is really doing in the Hans Baldung Grien woodcut, I think Steinberg is the victor. In a sense this is the argument he needs to win, if his thesis is to survive, so it is well that he wins it. We have the paintings, he says, and if we consent to look at them rather than adopt the unimaginative, unseeing habits of art historians unhappy ...”

“... what to do about it. He maintained a busy social calendar while waiting for inspiration to hit: ‘Victor Plarr of the old Rhymers’ Club … is in on Sunday supper-&-evenings, Yeats, Monday evenings, a set from the Irish Lit. Soc eats together on Wednesdays – & a sort of new Rhymers gang on Thursdays.’ In the late spring of 1912 he embarked on a walking ...”

“... One article began: ‘Some say you can judge a man by the way he furnishes his home.’ Barbara Ehrenreich thought the pin-ups were a cover for a style-conscious interest in the domestic interior: ‘The breasts and bottoms were necessary not just to sell the magazine but to protect it.’ In the ‘Playboy Penthouse’, every item of furniture and ...”

“... contempt. But if he slates the work – of the great historian Jules Michelet, for example, or of Victor Hugo, whose Les Misérables he sees as directed at ‘all that philosophico-evangelical vermin’ – he usually admires the man, Hugo especially, who in the 1870s he was to find one of the very few people left in Paris worth talking to. With ...”

“... dangerously close at times to suggesting that drinking and smoking are all right in moderation. Victor Kiernan would be incapable of saying anything so trite. But his book is the record of a long farewell to a much-loved addiction, and he has not permitted his change of heart to make him into a fanatical opponent. The population is praised for puffing its ...”

“... the ‘village school of the Bloomsbury intellectual’ – the school to which Aldous Huxley, Victor Gollancz, Ernst Freud and Barbara Hepworth sent their children. It held to project-oriented progressive pedagogy but also now prepared its pupils for university entrance exams.Dorothy’s wealth sustained this whole ...”

“... but Hedy Lamarr, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Her new surname was inspired by Barbara La Marr, a star of silent film. The ‘most beautiful’ tag came from Louis B. Mayer, who brought her to MGM with other Mitteleuropean émigrées such as Greer Garson and Ilona von Hajmassy (though the theatre director Max Reinhardt had already declared ...”

“... it declares. The Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of ...”

“... novel of passionate dividedness, as the aristocratic Leonard Radcliffe and the housing-estate boy, Victor Tolson, become obsessed with each other. They become close while working for a tent contractor, Ewbank, who later turns up in The Contractor. The play tells the story of a gang of marquee builders working at a wedding. The Royal Court summoned the tent ...”

“... things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he seems to have had an ear permanently cocked. Or was it his leg? Or was it his cock? Whichever, he was alert to the possibility that somebody close at hand might be about to offer ...”

“... not much remained of the young, energetic freedom fighter, full of conviction and appetite. Barbara Masekela, Mandela’s chief of staff from 1990 to 1995, described him as ‘an actor’. He allowed her to watch him ‘primping just before some delegation or person came to talk to him. You could actually see him becoming this Nelson Mandela, the great ...”

“... that showed him sashaying in matronly drag and preening for Donald Trump like a cross between Barbara Cartland and a funeral bouquet, a grotesque flirtation that proved prophetic. These two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all ...”