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“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... worried yet – Mitchell often took his sweet time writing a piece, and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, was never one to press a question, or even ask one in a voice above a whisper. Mitchell thought of his dream as marking the exact day ‘I began living in the past,’ but that, it could be argued, was a natural step for a man writing a book about ...”

“... self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame Merle, he is the great round world in person. And that remarkable fragment Sanditon perhaps takes this ...”

“... most notably the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which was set up in 1965 by means of a white paper and was therefore the creation entirely of the executive, and the City Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, a voluntary body forming part of the City of London’s means of self-regulation. The power to review the exercise of the Royal Prerogative was ...”

“... at Weir’s, Arthur MacManus of the SLP, the needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...”

“... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...”

“... Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... and reducing her, at least temporarily, to a meekly spousal role. Graves, for whom Riding was the White Goddess – ‘she was his muse and he loved her and abandoned himself to her,’ as one of the other disciples touchingly remarked towards the end – would have been horrified by such an outcome. But perhaps she secretly hankered for such a ...”

“... One without looks in tonight   Through the curtain-chink From the sheet of glistening white; One without looks in tonight   As we sit and think   By the fender-brink. We do not discern those eyes   Watching in the snow; Lit by lamps of rosy dyes We do not discern those eyes   Wondering, aglow,   Fourfooted, tiptoe. Hardy’s poem is ...”

“... del Oro, featuring a photograph of a buxom, dark-eyed equestrienne wearing ostrich feathers, white tights and a fetching pout. Rosita was the artist’s lover when he was a 15-year-old student in Barcelona. She has previously been described as a prostitute rather than a circus star. With the poster, Richardson illustrates a page from a sketchbook of the ...”

“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... at Reykjavik ‘resembled as nothing else the 1905 meeting between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser William II’. But the real difficulty is that to get at the kind of answers a historian of the Cold War now requires calls for access to the Russian archives. Before the war ended it was reasonable to act as if that day would never come. Now, to everyone’s ...”