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“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On Education without seeing that the ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while ...”

“... labour – also legal in character – and goes with mysterious politeness to a death in the New York Tombs: an enigmatic martyr, he seems to suffer from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying. Nicholas Salaman’s heroine Charlet, ‘falling apart’ in his new novel, has more to do with up-to-the-minute ...”

“... an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New York Times thought the most charitable speculation was that it had been ‘dictated but never read, neither by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime ...”

“... than three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages. George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... family would assemble for decades, and the year after a mansion in Bronxville (just north of New York City) where, he believed, they could escape Brahmin prejudice for good. In 1925, Kennedy dived into the movie business, cranking out low-budget ‘programme pictures’, tightening up costs and cultivating relations with the trade press. He successfully ...”

“... review christening the biography ‘a narrative masterwork’ was published in the New York Times Book Review on 1 April, Bailey tweeted a humblebraggy ‘it’s all downhill from here,’ or words to that effect. He was righter than he knew. Ozick’s magisterial blessing of Roth and The Biography represented the heights and from there on it was ...”

“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... earlier, to when De Beers’s chairman, Harry Oppenheimer, first met with representatives of a New York-based ad agency to discuss how best to market diamonds to the American public, given the Depression’s effect on sales. You could describe the agency’s strategies, which included sponsoring lectures at selected high schools about the glamorous history of ...”

“... chequered life and surprisingly genial personality, has appeared since Mary McCarthy’s New York Review essay on Naked Lunch in 1963. Negative reviews throughout his career consistently missed the point. Partisans continue to generate reams of ephemera about ‘language virus’ and other notions he gave apocalyptic weight to, but seem as prone to ...”

“... as a lack of romance and took a slew of marriage proposals in her stride. Prince Albert, Duke of York was ‘quite a nice youth’ but he hardly stood out from the crowd. It seems to have been sheer determination that made Bertie, the stammering, nerve-racked and less than handsome second son of George V, persist in proposing to the woman he had ...”