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“... and the British one gets off to a startling beginning by bodying forth the ghostly voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”

“... VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and Viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, and those of his lord deputy at Calais, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle. Most people have heard of the first and few (until now) of the second, though the lives of the two men were closely intertwined. Lisle was in several respects more fortunate than Cromwell. Imprisoned on a charge of treason, he ...”

“... in a road accident; when he married again and acquired a stepson of whom he grew very fond, that young man joined the RAF in the Second World War and was killed in full view of his parents. He had told them that to celebrate gaining his pilot’s wings he would fly his Hurricane over their home. As he turned away it crashed into the hillside across the ...”

“... and its reassertion of the best characteristics of British humour – funny, vulgar, true.) Arthur Marwick’s book almost deserves the same put-down. Almost, but not quite, because he’s somewhat less po-faced, if a good deal more prurient, than Kenneth Clark, and perfectly vulgar himself, though not particularly funny, alas. True? Is beauty truth, or ...”

“... 20th-century British political élite. In a well-known essay on ‘Middle Opinion in the 1930s’, Arthur Marwick called it ‘the most successful and most enduring of the “planning” groups’. Sparked off by a revolt of journalists on the Saturday Review, and founded in 1931 in the context of world slump and authoritarian solutions to the problems of ...”

“... Ravachol, the author Renée Vivien, or Ferdinand de Lesseps, make only fleeting appearances. Like young Pauline de Broglie in her bath, Weber’s cast of characters pass briefly across his stage: his real protagonist is the time-space continuum we call Fin-de-Siècle France. An ego like Ménétra’s, fit to dominate stories, must give way to officialdom and ...”

“... stayed home to begin his career of drink and debt. She was seen. At first glance it seemed a very young and slender girl, dowdily dressed in black and wearing a small, close fitting black bonnet: she might have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat ...”

“... where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when Sondheim makes clear how ...”

“... the Zulus claimed. Britain could not, or would not, hold on to the Transvaal. Disenchanted, the young adventurer decided that the time had come to make money out of Africa, like everyone else. Instead of digging for gold or diamonds, he turned to supplying ostrich feathers for fine ladies back home. Four years after hoisting the Union flag he and his wife ...”

“... Its leaves were yellowed and water-stained, and many words, in the cramped, even script of a young woman writing by flashlight under the bedcovers, difficult to decipher.’ By flashlight? Incredulity at such moments is partly a matter of offended taste. The literary training on offer in most of our universities inclines their graduates to jib at a ...”

“... but hard to handle: nostalgic autobiographies like Charlie Chaplin’s and novels like Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) or Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892). These and a multitude of other sources, especially school records, have been meticulously sifted by Davin. Associated from its conception with the History ...”

“... if a translation of this book was really necessary. At least Princeton had the sense to engage Arthur Goldhammer, who is not only in a position to draw on his own brilliant translation of Democracy in America for the passages quoted by Jaume, but has often managed to render Jaume’s prose more fluid than the original. Second, by focusing so intently on ...”

“... Everyone is in high spirits. Among those chattering girlishly as spring rolls and won ton arrive: Young but already world-famous deconstructionist literary critic, long involved in a lesbian relationship with an older professor at Yale. Somewhat mannish, chain-smoking medievalist of mysterious inclinations, with whom Famous ...”

“... nothing can be a real cool hand.’ He earns the respect of his fellow inmates (including a young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by ...”