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“... the Queen’s Gallery. Nasir-al-Din Haider had got clearance from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with ...”

“... philosophy and painting in her garage. In some circles, Charlie Karr would be called a loose cannon; in Leechfield, she is described as Nervous. At the sound of her voice, Mary’s friends ‘all startled a little the way a herd of antelope on one of those African documentaries will lift their heads from the water hole at the first scent of a ...”

“... part of his novel. ‘Allons! Said I; the post boy gave a crack with his whip--off I went like a cannon, and in half a dozen bounds got into Dover.’ Writing was life itself, realised in the speed of narration. ‘Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen.’ Sterne’s punctuation – those stretched dashes ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers and editors do the work he wants to help with – they keep going some intelligent conversation about ...”

“... Donaldson’s An Affair to Remember (1989); or Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant (2011) by Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife and the mother of his only child. And there is Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father (2011), the very fond book by that child, Jennifer Grant, who was born in 1966, almost exactly as Dad retired from pictures. As she admitted, there was ...”

“... on local funfairs where, for a few francs, revellers had been permitted to shoot a dwarf from a cannon. The official reason was the maintenance of public order, but the regional courts which initially overturned the bans pointed out that the shows were entirely orderly. The real issue was human dignity; but the people whose dignity was being compromised ...”

“... the arts. The expository flow is slowed down by authorial excurses: a disquisition on clocks and cannon, a report on what he sees and hears during one of his flâneurial rambles from Greenwich Village to the United Nations, reflections on a John Ashbery poem. Plainly he has read a lot of books. This one abounds with ...”

“... and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of Gravelines two days before, there were still great bodies of disciplined Spanish ...”

“... the nation was brainwashed into seeing the Crystal Palace as a ‘Temple of Peace’. John Tallis, in his guidebook, observed that ‘peace was on every lip’, and not, as one would expect, the Victorian equivalent of ‘Wow!’ Jeffrey Auerbach is much occupied with charting such changes in aspiration and emphasis. His book is less concerned ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”

“... that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ...”

“... Kempley, staff writer, of the 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood, written and directed by ‘homeboy’ John Singleton; in Kempley’s words, ‘a rude, insistent rap, an unflinching, often funny, always compassionate look at coming of age in Central Los Angeles’. The second is from a review ‘in the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers’ of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s ...”

“... storeys up, a captain in a smart grey wool coat sat behind a big desk in a corner office watching John Travolta in Be Cool. At least he had turned up for work; much of the Libyan police force now exists only on paper. A colonel in the internal intelligence service told me that he, and every other high-ranking officer he knows, shows up once a week to pick up ...”