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“... in this nation since slavery’, declaring it to be, in fact, ‘slavery in a way’, because its passage was part of a larger Leninist push to impose communism on America. He said that if people want to know the truth about President Obama, they should simply ‘read Mein Kampf’ and the works of Lenin, and that ‘if there were no Fox News and if there was ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... a man who manages to appear the supreme egotist, while seeking a kind of extinction of the ego. A passage in the unfinished novel Cécile – which recounts under the thinnest fictional veneer the story of Constant and Charlotte – is remarkably suggestive. The narrator and Cécile rendezvous at the Bal de l’Opéra where, both wearing masks, they stay till ...”

“... but also a historically-determined direction: that of the Soviet revolutionary struggle. The passage of time diminished the appropriateness of the original direction, and in 1932 Eisenstein, having out-stayed his leave of absence trying to make Que viva Mexico!, found disfavour in the eyes of Russia’s most powerful viewer, Stalin. This was a ...”

“... he was a born academic, absorbed in his armchair analysis of morals and social institutions, and Charles Lamb got his temperament right when he dubbed him ‘the Professor’. The book which made him, Political Justice (1793), was certainly not meant to emulate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in whipping up the political passions of the man in the street. It was ...”

“... as a boy he met Dickens in Victoria Park, Hackney and talked about authorship to him. There is a passage on these lines in Paul Kelver. But Jerome was not the only public figure to boast of such an encounter (see Coulson Kernahan’s introduction to Moss’s life). Jerome’s works are as treacherous a guide to reality as the travels of Perelman. The ...”

“... insisted in debate that it should be thrust into the draft BCP – that, or they would scupper the passage of the entire book. Cranmer’s first intention was apparently that the whole eucharistic service should henceforth be called the Lord’s Supper, but into the structure of the new English service he placed a short English rite for communicants to receive ...”

“... an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far ...”

“... examples, just as we are invited to describe our own idea of Eden. Again, in another very funny passage Auden evokes four kinds of critic he hopes a poet might not turn into: ‘a prig, a critic’s critic, a romantic novelist or a maniac’. The first is a person ‘for whom no actual poem is good enough’; the second manages ‘to deprive someone who has ...”

“... another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew ...”

“... anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in 1539. To a remarkable degree the audience for all these ...”

“... luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is ...”

“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot ...”

“... a handbag. His mother died in a home in Yorkshire in 1961, mentally deranged. Mrs Tynan quotes a passage of self-accusation, written years later, from his journals: ‘If she had come to London and lived with me in the Fifties, she could have been sustained by human contact ... I could have postponed her death at the expense of my own absorption in ...”