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“... and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin’s ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... study of how the British reconstructed their empire after the loss of the American colonies since Vincent Harlow’s much longer, yet less ambitious, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793 (two volumes, 1952 and 1964). And whereas most books could profitably be reduced to half their size, or compressed into an article, or even not written at ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about my ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... he’d joined a carnival, worked as a farmhand, had played out West with Woody Guthrie, with Gene Vincent, with Blind Lemon Jefferson ... He was soon even mythologising his own early days in New York, claiming to Shelton, who swallowed the story whole, that he spent his first two months in the big city hustling around Times Square as a rent boy. In the early ...”

“... set against a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... got Johnny Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t ...”

“... with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent Digby, the earl’s son-in-law. Walton, the gamekeeper, was William Walton; according to the 1861 census, he was born around 1800 in Somerton, Somerset. Mansel-Pleydell informs us that Walton is ‘still living’, a detail perhaps included for the ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... well known figure in the New York art world. In 1959 he embarked on a tumultuous love affair with Vincent Warren, the dancer. Through the early 1960s, O’Hara’s commitments at MOMA increased (so did his drinking). He also became a hero for younger Bohemian poets, who moved into New York scenes he’d helped to establish. Even so, until City Lights ...”

“... Britain (an honour Freud, much to Jones’s chagrin, later conferred on Jones’s friend and rival David Eder). He was Freud’s chief administrator and enforcer – he served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... religion is more likely to start from parish wills than from the study of church and state. John Vincent’s Poll-Books pioneered a history of politics ‘from the bottom up’, though Vincent now seems to prefer the study of prime ministers. ‘History on the ground’, originally almost a personal obsession of ...”

“... bound her wrists and feet ‘like a goat’. A 15-year-old, who had been visiting the UK from St Vincent since she was nine, was raped at gunpoint by three men as a way of settling financial scores with her father. Disowned by her grandfather, who had brought her to the UK, she ended up at Yarl’s Wood as part of an immigration crackdown: ‘I thought ...”