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“... each other, and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being ...”

“... of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the findings of a previous inquiry, commissioned by the Labour health minister Andy Burnham and intended ‘primarily to give those most affected by poor care an opportunity to tell their stories’. Many such stories had ...”

“... songs from The Lion King and The Little Mermaid. I played them some tunes on my phone. They loved Taylor Swift and Adele, but Kanye only confirmed their worst suspicions about Western decadence. Radiohead was met with confusion and they clearly hated the Pogues, which given the number of patriotic anthems I’d already been subjected to, seemed a bit ...”

“... a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters wearing a pair of budgie smugglers. The ...”

“... and tying paper flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the ...”

“... so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in Bournemouth; he was 84 that year. He had an eye for talent, and had once been friends with Wordsworth and Coleridge – he described them, rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating ...”

“... talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but ...”

“... want to do a cocktail party,’ he said. ‘I’d rather people left my shows and vomited.’ Andrew Bolton, the English curator and director of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, first staged Savage Beauty in New York in 2011 (where it became one of the most successful exhibitions ever – 661,509 people went to see it, exceeding all ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... unemployment figures mount because they lacked the economic expertise to get them down. As A.J.P. Taylor once put it, they were like doctors before the invention of antibiotics. All they could do was to prescribe rest and liquids, and take their fee. Present-day governments are in a quite different position. There is no secret about what needs to be done. The ...”

“... spluttering: ‘But the bloody man plays golf!’ While serious interest in the question posed by Andrew Crines and Kevin Hickson’s book – whether Wilson was ‘unprincipled’ – has long since been exhausted, what remains intriguing is the way in which his foibles, the hypocrisy and evasion that marked his premierships, were connected to broader ...”

“... benignly if, when given the chance, they had evinced a surer grasp of Kingsley’s stature. When Andrew Sinclair and James Michie are sniped at for being mean, for not picking up the tab, we get the feeling that Amis’s ire comes mainly from his not having been treated with sufficient deference. Surely it wasn’t just the money – and yet maybe it ...”

“... to kill him or, as Holmes claimed, just to put on the frighteners). This turned out to be Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton, an airline pilot, who met Scott, gained his confidence, and then, in October 1975, drove him and his great Dane, Rinka, across Exmoor, where he used a pretext to get Scott and Rinka out of the car, then shot the dog and – as was ...”

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... than most. ‘The circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’ included ‘Mr Andrew Gilligan’s broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003’ since these had ‘closely involved Dr Kelly’ because they had alleged ‘(1) that the government probably knew, before it decided to put it in its dossier of 24 September 2002, that ...”