“... is at first sight a strange way to describe a man who so resolutely avoided the discomforts of his home country. But the subtitle signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist ...”

“... man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble thought cannot feel at home in the exhausted receiver that is called “society”’? But to Newby (as to the satirical novelist) that particular receiver is pretty well inexhaustible; he shows himself excitedly à la page with the intrigues of various society women, as well as ...”

“... her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky ...”

“... of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding over the possibility of leaving his wife for decades, and there seems no obvious reason to look beyond the letter he wrote to her a few days before he died, explaining why he had to get away and wouldn’t be coming back: Your ...”

“... some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English ...”

“... mints for you! Thank you, Justice Kennedy! Now, granted, Blakey and I already were married in our home state – at least sort of. In August 2008 we managed to sneak in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex ...”

“... High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the co-author, with the famous paranormal investigator Harry Price, of a book on ...”

“... that in the Garden of Eden ‘the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’ (Genesis 3:1). During this first biblical stage of its career, the serpent was apparently less slithery than in later years, but it was already primed to lead Adam and Eve astray with lasting consequences for human sinfulness. Jews and ...”

“... disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the ...”

“... answer may prove the seminal feature of his book. He finds it in the north Oxfordshire home of Lord Falkland during the 1630s, where there met, as Aubrey said, ‘all the excellent of that peacable time’. The Great Tew circle can be studied from more than one angle. It can be seen as a literary group, a ...”

“... it – a faded provincial distance – is therefore relevant. But this is a story of ‘coming home’ in a more inward sense. In the course of the book the all-male and all-female drinking-bouts that pass for ‘social life’ evolve to something closer to simple human loving-kindness, where human beings actually talk to each other. The relationship of ...”

“... is the expectation – widespread in the late 19th century as well as in the trenches and on the Home Front – that the dead would regularly appear among the living. ‘Traditionally’, the dead were meant to remain dead. Ghosts appeared occasionally, but usually uninvited and unwelcomed. Their purpose in returning was generally to complain, to warn, to ...”

“... York producer sends me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a ...”

“... of battle’; soldiers’ deathbed letters from the front must have shaped mourning back home. Having a model of a ‘good death’ may well have made it possible for some soldiers to die more at peace than might otherwise have been the case. It is also possible that years of carnage might have weakened the power of faith to soften the terror of ...”