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“... and liked to dine with cats, whose paws he licked clean. Silberman includes a chapter about Henry Cavendish, a pathologically shy scientific polymath whose many breakthroughs include the 1766 discovery of hydrogen; ‘The way to talk to Cavendish is never to look at him,’ the astronomer Francis Wollaston was to say of him. Both books also rightly flay ...”

“... The Sunday night meetings on Bath Street in the city centre that Maclean began in late 1914 are Henry Bell’s nomination, in his biography of Maclean, for ‘the birthplace of Red Clydeside’.The city itself became a huge armaments factory: the Clyde Munitions Area. Most of the industrial unrest during the war took place in the engineering ...”

“... on bass, but the first thing we hear is the lugubriously reassuring voice of the producer, Tom Wilson, announcing ‘“Dime Store” – Take 1’. This is one of a number of unfamiliar early titles, for these are songs still in the making. Thus ‘She Belongs to Me’ is first slated as ‘My Girl’ and later as ‘Worse than Money’; and Highway ...”

“... Moses Jackson, his unswervingly heterosexual Oxford contemporary – is all-determining. He had, Tom Stoppard wrote, ‘an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unfitted for it, and never for a moment inclined to call upon it’ – and from whom, in Laurence Housman’s laconic ...”

“... man with birdlike features, giving a whispery commentary on his photographs in a voice which Tom Hopkinson, Brandt’s editor at Picture Post, described as ‘as loud as a moth’, and which even in 1983 retained more than a shadow of a German accent. Shuffling through his pictures, Brandt is gentle, polite, obliging, but unforthcoming. The interviewer ...”

“... that could live up to the claims for it made by politicians of all three parties. But it can’t. Henry Overman, professor of economic geography at the LSE, was once a paid adviser to the scheme. ‘HS2 is poor value for money compared with other transport plans,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 16 November 2013, ‘and may well be poor value for money ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House ...”

“... with a particular way of going about their trade, can shed their skins. The lapse of time between Henry Green’s Living (1929) and Nothing (1950) is shorter than between Money and The Pregnant Widow, but the transformation in the texture of the prose is total, from clotted to syncopated conversational flow. Green’s late style is thinned out but has its own ...”

“... in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my ...”

“... and Marthe Ouandié made sure some of their concerns were addressed. The conference was chaired by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan trade union activist who, it later transpired, was in close contact with the CIA. As Williams writes, ‘the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of ...”

“... 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His ...”

“... been proposed as a device (as well as a tale worth the telling) to buy time for another poet, for Tom Pickard perhaps. Ackroyd, coming from a more catholic (and Catholic) camp, is less fierce, less implicated, in his treatment. His Blake is decently crafted fiction overwhelmed by an excess of tyrannical facts. Looking back over my notes, I wasn’t ...”

“... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of ...”

“... conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene ...”

“... Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841-51, you find the following, dated 19 April 1848:The Rev. Mr Henry P.P. Bunenadden, county Sligo, in a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant, complained that the following persons met their deaths by hunger, owing to the neglect of the Guardians of the Boyle Union: KILSHALVEY ELECTORAL DIVISION – Mrs Kilkenny and child, after ...”