“... had some of her brother’s susceptibility to surroundings and dedication to the animating power of personality: charged by Dorothy’s husband to begin a great work, Strachey felt himself too ‘obsédé par les personnages’ to comply. But while his energy and imagination turned to anatomising his distaste for other people’s admirations, hers were ...”

“... it is now thought that the population of Roman Britain was greater than that of England under Henry VII; and it seems that both coin and industrial produce were more widely distributed than for many centuries to come. Yet Roman Britain can also look strange if not sinister: many Britons were apparently buried, quite literally, in their boots, or with ...”

“... mostly barren field. Nevertheless, in 1873 Losh’s much younger friend, a Carlisle doctor called Henry Lonsdale, who had known her in the last years of her life, included an account of her in the fourth volume of his Worthies of Cumberland. It was discreet and tantalisingly brief, but not pious. For his researches Lonsdale made use of seven volumes of ...”

“... in confronting the horrors of plague. But if saintly intervention through the visual arts had this power, why wasn’t there nostalgia for it during the plague of 1563, just five years after the end of the reign of the Catholic Mary over England? And why don’t we see evidence of 17th-century English Catholics producing or embracing such images, or recusant ...”

“... total sales passed those of what had been the most popular passenger car of the century, Henry Ford’s Model T. Like other popular small cars, the Morris Minor was exported and manufactured under licence abroad, but it was so emphatically English in style and conception that its popularity was mostly confined to countries of the Empire and ...”

“... a round or oval portrait a couple of inches wide. The diminutiveness, of course, is part of its power. A miniature exemplifies the compositional ideal of multum in parvo, a lot in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those ...”

“... attachment to models was stronger than it was in the more pragmatic UK, Conquest’s first book, Power and Policy in the USSR (1961), ran into some criticism on these grounds. Thereafter, a tinge of mutual scepticism and condescension informed his relationship with academia, despite the coincidence of Cold War views between Conquest and most academic ...”

“... by the startling number of gifted writers which that class produced. But ‘at the height of their power, the Anglo-Irish gentry and their hangers-on were as brutal, violent and racist as any colonial elite defending its interests anywhere in the world.’ That goes for some of his own ancestors, like Sir Henry Blake, a ...”

“... tempted to speculate that Mr Cooper all too accurately recorded the footsteps in the corridors of power – the work today seems to have an immense gentility, almost an old-world courtliness, in its dealings with the reader. Patently, this implied reader is not a man of 1982, but someone who would respond with appropriate bonhomie to a gentleman’s ...”

“... he was alive. ‘I think he has had – will have had – the most exquisite literary fortune,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse when Pater died in 1894, ‘i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius) & absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face.’ For James, Pater’s biography is ...”

“... second case concerns the letter which Berenson sent early in 1924 to another American millionaire, Henry Goldman, who had paid Duveen’s over $250,000 ‘for what he understood to be an original masterpiece by the great Fra Angelico’. The letter apparently reassured Goldman that the painting was very important and was in fact well preserved. This was a ...”

“... madness as the product of a process of mental and physical degeneration. In the words of Henry Maudsley, the dominant figure of Fin-de-Siècle English psychiatry, the madman ‘is the necessary organic consequent of certain organic antecedents: and it is impossible he should escape the tyranny of his organisation.’ The physical signs of ...”

“... or how to achieve certain effects. Schwartz was 21 when he wrote it, and part of its charm and power certainly derives from its gaucheness, its schoolboy earnestness. Though it aims to be wise in a passionate, Dostoevskian way, it really succeeds through its awkwardness and innocence. The domestic situation which ‘In dreams begin ...”

“... Sam Pollit, the father, tells the children in his amiable, garrulous way that if he had ‘supreme power’ he might arrange the killing off of nine-tenths of mankind ‘in order to make room for the fit’. This would be done by gas attacks on people living ignorant of their fate in selected areas, a sort of eugenic concentration camp.’ Louisa, the ...”

“... consequences and that their formal choices and spatial concepts institutionalise relationships of power’. The editors thus pose tough and insistent questions to all their participants; but they are questions without answers; and an outside observer may have the feeling that architecture today is generally locked into a host of irresolvable ...”