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“... walk. His look of quizzical apprehension changed to an amiable apology when I explained I was the Richard Shone to whom he had sent a note a few days earlier asking me to ‘drop in’. ‘Yes, of course you are,’ he said. The note had been prompted by Nancy Ackerley, a friend of mine and the sister of Forster’s great friend J.R. Ackerley, who had ...”

“... all rather shabby and haphazard. It was not for want of money – Lydia was very well off, though Richard Kahn, a Cambridge economist and Keynes’s literary executor, was tight-fisted with her allowance. The pictures were not well arranged or dusted – when I took one down, the skeleton of a small bird fell out from behind it. ‘They do not belong to ...”

“... making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He ...”

“... it, you might find that the work of these painters has, if not rigour, its own sort of integrity. Richard Morphet’s catalogue essay speaks with a fine generosity about the slow, steady, affirmative qualities of their later painting. This sort of pleading won’t settle the issue, however. The exhibition in question was just too big: ‘pleasure’, whatever ...”

“... In an experiment reported many years ago a pencil of light was shone through a tank. The resident goldfish chose to swim back and forth through the beam. This was interpreted as evidence of an appetite, perhaps a need, for sensory stimulation. If it could, the goldfish too might pay good money to be dropped from a great height or whirled through the air ...”

“... and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being focused and ...”

“... Paladin, in December 1944, and replace him with the gentler, Foreign Office-trained Terence Shone. Perhaps in 1945, when the mandatory power started shelling Damascus to enforce its mission civilisatrice, and British troops had to be sent to stop them, Churchill may have wished he had left his Paladin in place. Churchill had given Spears a knighthood in ...”

“... All three of Ali Smith’s novels are set in holiday places. In Like (1997), Amy Shone and her daughter Kate live on a caravan site in Scotland; the characters of Hotel World (2001) are guests and workers at the Global Hotel in an unnamed city; in The Accidental, the new book, the Smart family are spending their summer in a mock-Tudor holiday house near the Norfolk Broads ...”

“... results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper all the rest. Visiting kings, like Richard and Philip II of France, bickered about precedence; the Christian nobility in Palestine fought each other for the increasingly enfeebled crown of Jerusalem; above all, Crusaders fresh from Europe, with all the bigoted ignorance of their modern successors ...”

“... elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with ...”

“... Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to ...”

“... Sir Arthur fforde, whereas it or ginated in the Pilkington Committee’s report and was drafted by Richard Hoggart, then a member of the committee. The phrase ‘the political establishment’ is used several times. It seems to me portentous and vague. I suspect that if it had to be defined, it would fall out of use. The whole political establishment is said ...”

“... Charles Curran, a polemicist who wrote a dull column in the Evening News, and Edwin Leather, who shone on TV. I did not count. Deedes was not a particularly effective minister. Bail water as he might, Macmillan’s ship slowly foundered on de Gaulle’s veto on our entry into the EEC, and was finally sunk by the doctor who wrongly diagnosed the Prime ...”

“... Richard​ Holbrooke is the only American diplomat since the Vietnam War to have become a full-throttle celebrity, as likely to appear in the tabloids clutching a woman as putting forward a policy proposal in Foreign Affairs. In his thirst for publicity and enthusiasm for the pantomime of statesmanship, only Holbrooke’s nemesis, Henry Kissinger, compares ...”

“... and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of ...”