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“... to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever since. Despite the ...”

“... the Tory leader had finished his set of tennis. Then there was the drink. Margot denounces F.E. Smith for drinking too much, ‘which is always ruinous to anyone’. She cannot have been unaware that her husband was lightly pickled a lot of the time and on a couple of occasions too soused to wind up a debate in the Commons. Not for nothing did George ...”

“... for freedom of expression an impressive range of talents: Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho ...”

“... at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of Weimar Berlin, monumental glass and concrete skyscrapers of the kind that would be realised only after the war. His drawings, reproduced in A3: Threads and ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... of immortality did exist – and perhaps we could share in his godlike status. The blurb to Donald Douglas Duncan’s book of photographs – a selection from his previous books brought out, like Penrose’s slightly similar Portrait of Picasso, to coincide with the centenary – catches the tone exactly: ‘Through these extraordinary photographs, introduced ...”

“... of Victorine Hutchins embeds what is, I believe, a melancholy self-portrait in the figure of Magda Smith, the attractive and mysterious newcomer to the village who in the book’s climactic scene (and only real piece of extended ‘plotting’) seduces the youthful Costello. Thin, dark, short-haired and made up like a demi-mondaine, Magda has been abandoned by ...”

“... American newspaper, The Amsterdam News, devoted more than four times as much space to a review of Douglas Fairbanks’s Don Q, Son of Zorro, despite Robeson’s celebrity. Micheaux has largely been written out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and of cinema history, but his films are filled with commentary on contemporary black personalities and cultural ...”

“... among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist ...”

“... a hotel, to the great annoyance of the management.’ They travel to Normandy to see where Keith Douglas was shelled as he stood beside his tank. They prowl around Roundhay Park in Leeds, where John Riley was mugged and beaten to death in the wee hours after drinking at a pub. They also go to predictable and even boring places: Wallace Stevens’s house (he ...”

“... What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit. Striding into the sunlight, we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into ...”

“... wittingly or unwittingly tainted with HIV – has renewed our interest in the sanguinary, and Douglas Starr has now set this interest in context. He describes his book as ‘the story of blood – the chronicle of a resource, the researchers who have studied it, the businessmen who have traded it, the doctors who have prescribed it, and the lay people ...”

“... Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair mobilising ...”

“... an artist whom he calls ‘Gypsy’ (modelled, it seems from Brogan, on an American, Pixie Colman-Smith) entertains guests in an atmosphere of incense, and after she has chanted some Yeats, they sing ‘Spanish Ladies’, which ‘nearly all’ know by heart. Ransome’s early book ends with the explicit recognition that ‘Bohemia’ is for young people, and ...”

“... of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a ...”