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“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston – herself once a fixture in the New York art world – described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find Martin: a sort of sapphic Quest for Corvo. I don’t remember much about the article, except that Johnston quoted a gnomic comment by Martin on death: you go out either in terror or in ...”

“... was too slight, but Wesker appears whose connection was even slighter. I saw Coward first in New York in 1962 at one of the regular parties given by Arnold Weissberger, a showbusiness accountant. The party was, as ever, stiff with celebrities, the most glamorous to me being the now slightly faded film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on ...”

“... the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived in New York from 1913 to her death – we know next to nothing. The elusive Duse, one feels, would have approved. The same preference for austerity informs Acocella’s view of Cather and her critics. Brief though it is (only 94 pages of full-blown text), Willa Cather ...”

“... son, are so boringly over-familiar that if one were to meet it in Hampstead or Hackney or the New York slums, treated in whatever genre by a writer from those backgrounds, it would almost certainly be even more boring. Can it be that Robert Traill Spence Lowell intuited that in his royal dynasty nothing was boring, and founded his poetic art on that equivocal ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate ...”

“... scandal, as in 1809, when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, had been using her position to broker the sale of commissions.Historians​  of later periods will benefit from applying Knights’s big themes to subsequent stages of the corruption story. Just as empire and war were ...”

“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”

“... feature in their thought process.’Reid’s speech was popular enough to be reprinted in the New York Times, but with all reference to Scotland, including the commission’s reforms, left out. Nobody at Westminster seemed to be taking notice of the widespread local resentment caused by this ‘blueprint for bureaucracy, not democracy’. With ...”

“... has written books on Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee, as well as on ‘the golden age of New York cabaret’, should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given when he mentions Gary Glitter and Jonathan King, both of whom were later found guilty of sexually abusing minors.)Wham! signed off with a show at Wembley in 1986. By then, Prince ...”

“... ethnonationalism’s quick ascent there)? What explains headlines on the BBC and in the New York Times like ‘Hind Rajab, six, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help’, ‘Tears of Gaza father who lost 103 relatives’ and ‘Man Dies after Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say’? Why have Western ...”

“... from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically ...”

“... of the expected scene on Nassau Street in Princeton. It was Artur Sergeevich, now removed from New York to live on Linden Lane, in the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had moved permanently to France. Every inch of interior wall had been covered in murals by a young French painter, against which Lourié looked finally at ...”

“... streets of the capital and triggered the violence of the June Days.The Düsseldorf artist Johann Peter Hasenclever captured such a moment in Workers before the City Council. Painted in 1849 and widely exhibited in a number of versions, it shows a delegation of labourers whose work-creation scheme – excavation work on the various arms of the Rhine – had ...”