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“... is only one humanity, but an infinite number of gods. This position may be a mistaken one, but it took a while to evolve and is congruent with quite a lot of what is observable, demonstrable and thinkable. It is, of course, based upon the principle of doubt and revision, and doesn’t conform very well to what might be wished by those who yearn for ...”

“... The trial of Rudolf Nureyev, traitor number 50,888, took place in absentia and behind closed doors, in Leningrad on 2 April 1962. If convicted under article N64 Nureyev faced the death penalty. Five witnesses were interviewed in a small room overlooking the Fontanka Canal. The witnesses included Vitaly Strizhevsky, the KGB’s man in the Kirov, Georgi Korkin, the Kirov’s director, and Alla Osipenko, who gave a less than favourable review of her dancing partner’s character – ‘not respected … resented … rude and too self-regarding ...”

“... music, French, ballet, gymnastics, tap-dancing, ice-skating, ‘even baton twirling’. They took out a loan to buy her a $13,000 piano, but they wouldn’t try to buy a house until she was grown up: ‘Condoleezza is our house,’ they would say. They tried enrolling her in school when she was three, in a class with children twice her age, but she cried ...”

“... novels, and the four volumes of memoirs, and the three volumes of journals, and the biography of John Aubrey, and the collected reviews and criticism. Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in Westminster on 21 December 1905 – a wintry rather than a Christmas baby. ‘It was because he was Welsh,’ Barber teases, ‘that Powell pronounced his name to rhyme with ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been going since she was a child star in National Velvet and where she liked to order caviar and chocolate-covered strawberries – ‘all the things a woman like Elizabeth should be dining ...”

“... note: but nothing now can change the way I went indoors, chilled by the wind and made a fire and took down my book and opened it and failed to comprehend the harmonies of servitude, the grace music gives to flattery and language borrows from ambition – and how I fell asleep oblivious to the planets clouding over in the skies, the slow decline of the ...”

“... one.’ She looked me up and down. ‘Well, you’re still in one piece, at least.’ The remark took me by surprise, but I had to laugh. She was referring to an incident a few weeks earlier, when the fan had come on suddenly just moments after I had pulled my arm from the rotors. This wasn’t supposed to happen: according to health and safety ...”

“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... too. The principal driver of the decline in life expectancy seems to be the opioid epidemic, which took 64,000 lives in 2016, many more than guns (39,000), cars (40,000) or breast cancer (41,000). At the same time, the income of the typical worker, the real median hourly income, is about the same as it was in 1971. Anyone time-travelling back to the early ...”

“... the champagne bottle and sent the ship – splash! – into the River Carron. Then Uncle Alex took us round the miniaturised industrial world of the shipyard: the pattern-lofts, where the templates of ribs and plates were cut in plywood; the foundry with its moulds of wet black sand; echoing corrugated-iron sheds where shears clipped steel sheet like ...”

“... of 21 is the author of two novels. Vidal looks directly into the camera, sullen and contentious. John Chamberlain, who wrote the text, declares Stafford the ‘most brilliant’ of the lot. By this time she had published two novels; her career as a short-story writer was just getting under way. Unlike Capote and Vidal, Stafford never became a celebrity, and ...”

“... summer of 1993 was caused by a blockage rather than a weakness in the heart itself. However, he took his doctors’ advice and skipped his annual harangue at the Tory Conference that year; it would have been too great a risk. The main reason Heseltine has never reached the top is that he failed to cultivate the voters, which is the greatest error a ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”