“... that Clancy knows the back lots and the business. For his B-list screenwriting client Stewart Stern, Clancy pulled off a coup by getting him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a ...”

“... photographed in plus-fours, so that he seemed to have very long ankles, and Elgar, a grey, stern, stiff old man, his white moustache a frozen waterfall over his lip. Menuhin, in a note written when he was much older, described this first encounter with the great English composer: how Elgar played a few bars of his Violin Concerto with the boy at the ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... Redmond O’Hanlon’s account of a journey to Borneo, undertaken with the poet James Fenton, was a grand deception, in which the ostensible search for an indigenous rhinoceros on the slopes of a mountain fastness turned out to be so much camouflage. Clues as to what was really happening could be glimpsed in the structure of O’Hanlon’s narrative ...”

“... outlined could be unbearable in the hands of any writer less sensitive than Elizabeth Bowen. Henry James had a similar theme on his hands in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With E. Bowen ...”

“... Porter, traditional, carried out in the teeth of Abstract Expressionism, are subjected to a stern interrogation, during which any number of flaws are stigmatised (like Porter’s difficulty with faces) before Updike can allow himself the ludicrously indulgent comparison of Interior with a Dress Pattern to ‘the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio ...”

“... do violence to his actual variety and contradictions. There is the conservatives’ Burke, stern exponent, in Philippe Raynaud’s words, of those ‘limits which the limited nature of man sets to political action’. There is the liberals’ Burke, staunch critic of religious intolerance, the slave trade and capital punishment. There is even, among ...”

“... the affair with his best friend’s wife, Jane Brookfield. ‘No biography’ was Thackeray’s stern instruction to his daughters, which they dutifully observed. But a biography had to be written so that we, unlike the benighted Victorian, can thoroughly understand Henry Esmond. This mission to unlock the text is what sanctions – ostensibly – the vast ...”

“... the uniquely impartial and wise arbiter of values. Fuentes’s ideal novelist also works under the stern injunction to ‘write everything that history has not said, otherwise it will be forgotten’. This is not, as the smug Anglo-Saxon might surmise, because semi-literate Latin America has too little written history, but because it has much more than Clio in ...”

“... is original and powerfully persuasive. The radical challenge, in the person of the Irish painter James Barry, had appeared within the Royal Academy as well. Barrell devotes a shorter but equally revelatory chapter to the lectures and other writings that led to the artist’s expulsion from that body in 1799. Despite that result and the antagonism between ...”

“... reading is interesting, though heavily indebted to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he ...”

“... blood, the best in England’. His mother died when he was two days old, his father was a stern, aloof figure. For a single term he played the fop at Oxford, then drifted into the Oscar Wilde circle. He received a presentation copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol from Wilde and spent six days with him in exile, before taking a calculated decision to ...”

“... by learning and by virtue’.Nine years later, in Johnson’s Idler, criticism is no longer a stern or remote celestial being, but ‘a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.’ This beguiling ...”

“... She learnt the art of public speaking, as well as the simple, accessible language of the King James Bible. Like so many other British politicians over the centuries, she would draw on this source regularly in her speeches, quoting verses, telling homely parables, and infusing everything she said with a fire and earnestness borrowed from the pulpit. Even ...”

“... of it being a first night as that the cast have been doing it on and off now for two years. When James C. drops his head on his desk it’s with an almighty crash and he gets up looking a bit pale, but there are no other slip-ups. The response at the end is tumultuous, the audience (though I think this is nowadays obligatory) rising to their feet en ...”