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“... at his performances. As Greer herself recalls: ‘I was once on stage with The Doors and saw James Morrison [sic] turn upstage to stimulate himself before turning to show the outline of his engorged member to his shrieking audience.’ The argument wobbles between one desire and the other: an eroticised yearning after passing innocence, or the driven ...”

“... Brooke in profile (‘your favourite actress’, some of his friends labelled it). He was, Henry James wrote, ‘in an extraordinary degree … a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’ (James had fallen hard for what Brooke called ‘his fresh, boyish stunt’).In 1918 his Collected Poems were finally ...”

“... be the more appropriate word) a misunderstanding. Only when I got her book did I realise that Liz Jones is not Samantha Brick. Scandalised Twitter links melded them together in my lazy mind as the same person (they write for the Daily Mail, everyone hates them, both women) in spite of the huge clue that one was called Liz ...”

“... poem about libraries begins jauntily, for instance, almost like Betjeman: ‘The Mitchell, Brynmor Jones and Andersonian,/Delightful Bailey’s when it lived in Blythswood Square ...’ But it soon snags: Dear God, forgive the overdose of venison And the gluttonous bombast of beer and Beaujolais, Intensive seminars on ‘Libraries Today’. That last line ...”

“... she said. “I thought maybe you were just another wop or something.”’ Twenty years earlier, James Weldon Johnson, a black man who served as American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua during the Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft administrations, opened his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) with the sentence: ‘I know that in ...”

“... aristocrats speaking of themselves as middle-class, as they frequently do these days.’ So Bence-Jones and Montgomery-Massingberd take the word ‘gentleman’ and make it mean ‘aristocratic’: their definitions define not so much what is as what they think ought to be. They begin by closing the gap between the terms ‘nobility’ and ...”

“... had much to boast about in the inter-war period. In his foreword to Hidden Weapons, Professor R.V. Jones recalls expressing disquiet to Lord Vansittart that MI6 was recruited on the basis of friendship rather than competence. Vansittart agreed, but added that the pay was so bad it was only your friends you could persuade to take the job. Ironically, Kim Philby ...”

“... own living, as an indictment of the culture that made her so vulnerable. The former Edith Newbold Jones had been shaped by that culture also, but her newly-published letters remind us of how strenuously she resisted some of its influences. Not that they provide any immediate record of the years when such resistance must have been critical: except for a mildly ...”

“... upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping Dutchman searched vainly for a theory to justify their coup. They might claim that ...”

“... for innumerable European potboilers as well as Orientalist films such as Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.)Many of the works that derive from the BM’s own collections were locked away in its Secretum for decades, accessible only to those whose gender and class supposedly made them invulnerable to corruption. John Woodroffe ...”

“... independent woman tied by an early marriage to the demanding, fickle, hypochondriac Edward Burne-Jones, who first took sick on their wedding night – the intended honeymoon was in Paris, but they got no further than Chester. The Macdonald family’s origins were modest. They were from Methodist stock, their paternal grandfather had been ordained by ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... Mike Figgis, who has made three feature movies in Hollywood: Internal Affairs, Liebestraum and Mr Jones, respectively a successful police thriller, a quirky psychological drama and a character study of a manic-depressive. It is a stretch to imagine him pitching his new movie, Leaving Las Vegas, in similar circumstances. Leaving Las Vegas is about a failed ...”

“... brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet ...”

“... on the answers. Those are fiction’s strengths, though Crichton, who has described Henry James as ‘trivial’, would no doubt disagree. On the other hand, an informed argument about the benefits and dangers of new kinds of scientific research and the ways they should be funded and controlled isn’t helped by an unintentionally hilarious emulsion ...”