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“... 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 ...”

“... Only soft drinks were on offer. He failed to sparkle. The vote at the end was won by the stern young Labour candidate, Will Scobie; Ian Driver, the Green, came second. Farage was last. That doesn’t mean he won’t be South Thanet’s next MP. He and his party are popular there. The latest poll by Lord Ashcroft gives Ukip the seat, with 33 per cent ...”

“... with ‘impersonal, scientific objectivity’ she analysed her baby’s behaviour and followed a stern ‘childrearing discipline’ which ‘rejected cuddling’. During Gavin’s strictly allocated ‘play-minutes’, Edwin and the baby enjoyed ‘a giggling match’, but as the boy grew up, his mother and father struggled to look after him. They sent him ...”

“... what seem to be her extravagances, we must remember that she was also saying, all along, some very stern and quite unextravagant things about what we have been doing to our minds and hearts. ‘Almost with each passing day,’ she wrote in her essay about the Columbia uprising it becomes harder for liberalism to claim that it has been adequate to the tasks it ...”