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“... In Northanger Abbey, Austen enacts the conventional belief in the frivolity of dress by having Mrs Allen, Catherine’s chaperone, make embarrassing and comic remarks about finery – its details, its price – in every other utterance. At the same time, however, Henry – who isn’t laughed at – knows all about fashionable muslins, and discusses them ...”

“... evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or ...”

“... and the smattering of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you see it as an attempt on ...”

“... who’s documented in the region was marrying someone else fifty miles away in 1924. A stepfather, George Williams, was quickly found and the family weathered the Great Depression on his earnings as a janitor at the post office, a job that was made secure by New Deal investment in their hometown, Wichita Falls. Greatly impressed by Ronald Colman as Sydney ...”

“... and easy to manipulate, aren’t they? Are they? A generation ago, the historians E.J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E.P. Thompson demonstrated that even rioting crowds are ‘not fickle, peculiarly irrational, or generally given to bloody attacks on persons’. Their conclusions have been confirmed by three decades of historical case-studies of violent crowds ...”

“... leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a gorgeously attired Peruvian whom he had approached for a dance at a diplomatic reception, on the grounds that he was drunk, the music ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... all. What role, I wondered, can poetry play in such an environment? I had in mind something like Allen Grossman’s admission that he is uncertain what poetry ‘can now mean in the context of the actual human task’. But Seidel simply responded with Samuel Johnson’s line, borrowed from Sidney (who got it from Horace), that poetry must please and ...”

“... personals column of the New York Review of Books, placed by a young couple straight out of a Woody Allen movie, who want to swap their house and flee post-9/11 New York for the comparative safety of the countryside; on impulse, Zuckerman offers them his house, on condition that they move out straight away. And finally, after re-establishing contact with Amy ...”

“... European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the Maldives when the sanctions arrangements began, and is ...”

“... deal of time with Lacy in Tangier and the South of France, where they met a number of writers. Allen Ginsberg described Bacon as ‘a great English painter … who looks like an overgrown seventeen-year-old schoolboy … wears sneakers and tight dungarees and black silk shirts … like[s] to be whipped and paints mad gorillas in grey hotel rooms drest in ...”

“... of the Church, it only aped what humans do best of all, and have the most fun with. Sex, Woody Allen said in happier times, is only dirty if you do it right. Conversely, disgust gets you off the hook of love if you nurture it as Swift did, both tormenting and releasing himself with the thought: ‘Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;/Oh! Cælia, Cælia, Cælia ...”

“... her.’ Unawed, the couple make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It ...”

“... congratulate David Sheppard (a Gentleman) on his century, and even called him ‘David’. Basil Allen, the Gloucestershire captain, rounded on Graveney – ‘He’s Mister Sheppard to you’ – and later called in at the Cambridge dressing room. ‘I must apologise for Graveney’s impertinence,’ he told Sheppard. ‘I think you’ll find it won’t ...”

“... by night,’ and more in that vein. Having mentioned, in passing, Scott’s role in orchestrating George IV’s visit to Edinburgh, he went on chattily: ‘About the Royal Visit Professor Johnson has an amusing anecdote to relate’; the anecdote is quoted at length. And then, as so often, just as he seems to be launching into another aspect of his topic, he ...”