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“... At this stage, one of Toryism’s least secret weapons was the Young Conservative organisation. Anthony Bailey, then a schoolboy in Hampshire, recalls: ‘I did a number of things purely because they provided a way of meeting girls. I joined the local branch of the Young Conservatives for that purpose. Labour continued to govern the nation, but I was ...”

“... space attested to by signed legal documents and canvases must be filled with intuitive assertion. Anthony Bailey’s clever choice of title allows his book to expand into a portrait of Vermeer’s environment. Mixed in with much pedestrian scene-setting – ‘the Catholic faith was sneered at by diehard Protestants as “Romish ...”

“... they could not. It was to these Protestants that Sir Basil Brooke declared in 1934 (as quoted by Bailey): ‘If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster.’ Since border revision had been set aside in 1925, by mutual consent of Craig and the Free State leaders, systematic reform inevitably called in question the ...”

“... Volume One of Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, left our hero in January 1960 under sentence of death, no more than a few months to live. With one bound, or at least one letter from the Neurological Institute, he is free. ‘The protein content of my spinal liquor had gone down dramatically’: the death sentence is cancelled ...”

“... at which Thorpe lost his seat), all culminating in a Bonfire of the Vanities trial at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1979, at the end of which Thorpe and his three co-defendants were all acquitted of charges of conspiracy to murder (and in Thorpe’s case of incitement to murder as well). In this reflective but elusive volume of memoirs the author ...”

“... A week after Mandela’s release I got a call from Jim Bailey, my former employer on Drum Magazine in Johannesburg where I worked in the late Sixties. He had been elated by the news and set about gathering old Drum hands and sympathisers for a reunion. But by the time we met, he confessed to a sudden weariness, a kind of post partum depression after the forty years of toil and tension ...”

“... A number of journalists have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and ...”

“... of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of John Cann ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers – an impressive plurality of the films of the 1950s that have lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served ...”

“... to the same teenage movie population. But they are different, and played by different actresses (Bailey Spry and Maika Monroe). The movie tells the story of this second girl, Jay. So was this scary start a prelude to our main tale, or its conclusion, to which we are about to return through a long narrative flashback? Neither, as it happens, and once we ...”

“... inevitably incestuous, family. What if Laura Hunt – Gene Tierney from Laura – met George Bailey, James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life? Thomson treats the film characters as real people with disorienting, almost vertigo-inducing results. So Sally, Susan Sarandon’s wholesome oyster-shucking waitress in Atlantic City, becomes the kid sister of ...”

“... sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times defending Lyndon ...”

“... races. The guests have included a significant number of property developers, among them Michael Bailey, a regular guest at the Mahon tribunal, who negotiated a €25 million settlement with the Revenue Commissioners following an inquiry into unpaid taxes. Cowen cancelled the show this summer, and the tent is unlikely to be pitched again. Jim McDaid, a ...”

“... Like most biographers, Anthony Masters starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter ...”