“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... furtively seeks out the camera’s gaze. He is posed by Man Ray, displaying his beautiful hands; Cecil Beaton photographs him smoking opium, in a sepia haze. He is portrayed by Philippe Halsman as a god with six arms, bearing pen, book, cigarette, scissors: caught between versions of himself, he becomes Cocteaux. As if refracted by these multiple ...”

“... be exempted from income tax, and who owned numerous racehorses and five or six cars with what Cecil Parkinson called ‘cherished number plates’. The milieu of the Firm, a name that unhappily suggests a cadre of tunbellied enforcers, is far away from what its subjects, who are determinedly not citizens, see and know.What the Firm glimpses outside its ...”

“... they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, John Bayley and Philip Larkin have paid her tribute as a superb observer of comic detail, and as the delineator of a world, the Anglican parish, which has a Betjemanesque charm. The article which can perhaps claim to have ‘discovered’ her, by ...”

“... half of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when ...”

“... Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps as ...”

“... young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish dedication, in turn constituted a marketable endorsement. That this worked for Shakespeare, at least ...”

“... friend collapsed and they are hung up. I don’t want to go to an ordinary typist.’ he wrote to Cecil Gray. Peter Conrad’s readings of Lawrence are utterly tone-deaf, and not to be able to listen to Lawrence, to move with the cadences of his voice, is not to know what he is saying. As a characteristic example, he asserts that, in Lawrence’s essay ‘Pan ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously attractive man.) There was Robert Armstrong, saving her from this fiasco, if not from one of her more ridiculous but sinister attempts to sustain state secrecy – but all the while murmuring that he thought Aids the greatest challenge to any government in his lifetime. And then as the ...”

“... without a substantial) rank and file, and this could hardly be recruited in such a way. Lord Hugh Cecil once pointed out that’a class is in its very idea a separate thing with common interests,’ whereas ‘sex is just the opposite. Sex is a body whose members are essentially interested in the members of the other sex.’ British feminist leaders have ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death ...”

“... to have struck many as both wild and a bit silly, ‘buffoonish, half-absurd, half-serious’ in Cecil Day-Lewis’s account. Rosamund Lehmann wrote wearily to a friend at Christmas in 1932: ‘That absolute lunatic Stephen Spender is still with us … he has been booming, droning, pouring, bursting out of doors like a northeaster, into rooms like a fiery ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”