“... Like other tales, ‘Taman’ borrows from the essentials of Gothic without using its atmosphere. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, on the other hand, uses every item in the Gothic book, combining Scottish diablerie with an old Spanish setting of changeless sloth and superstition, a time-warp in which the intruder’s romantic love is desolated by the ...”

“... The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons Corner Houses. There is much worldly wisdom along the lines of: ‘All attractive girls ...”

“... lawyers that would make any plea, or any combination of pleas, feasible. His original lawyer, Robert Shapiro, is famous for defending Marlon Brando’s son when he killed his sister’s lover several years ago (this was one of the first cases to be shown on the now very popular Court TV). To this shining example of legal virtue, O.J. has subsequently ...”

“... mixture of excitable populism and authoritarianism, the latter copied from his revered mentor, Sir Robert Peel, whose ‘Canute-like executive arrogance’ had wrought so much damage in the 1840s. In this account Gladstone emerges as a half-crazed genius, who, unexpectedly elected as master of the college, had then gone on to write a weekly column for the ...”

“... St Joan, and when he appeared in Shaffer’s The Public Eye; he sustained close friendships with Robert Bolt and the German scholar Erich Heller, and was never happier than when alone in his flat listening to Brahms and Fauré or reading Eliot and Tennyson. A keen subscriber to the TLS and occasional contributor to the Listener and Spectator, he could be ...”

“... with the star (called ‘Jean Shaw’ and a compound of Veronica Lake, Bette Davis and Loretta Young) revives dangerous nostalgia for Hollywood’s clear-cut moralities:   ‘And I remember – I don’t know if it was that picture or another one – you shot the bad guy. He looks at the blood on his hand, looks down at his shirt. He still can’t ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is attractive about Powell, and a good deal of what makes his compatriots occasionally shy away from ...”

“... alive and around at the time. I discovered that even this could be fudged in some standard works. Robert Payne is an acknowledged expert on Russian affairs, author of Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait, The Image of Chekhov, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak. The Life and Death of Lenin (1964) runs to 672 pages. I returned to it to check the death toll in the ...”

“... unpopular decisions about rearmament. More sympathetically, though with some equivocation, G. M. Young in his official ‘life’ suggested that, whatever the faults of Baldwin’s substantive policies, he at least deserved credit for having forged a united political nation, able to meet the crisis of 1940. Few have been prepared to see much virtue in ...”

“... to … ruin the taxpayers. Under the New Poor Law the destitute – sick or fit, old or young – would face a stark alternative: the workhouse, or a choice between beggary, charity, crime and starvation. And life in the workhouse was intended to be less pleasant (‘less eligible’) than the life of the lowest-paid workers outside, with convict ...”

“... Juliette, though when Thomson’s Zummo refers to ‘my plague pieces’ there’s a hint of the Young British Artist in the slickness of the phrase. Zummo’s unusually unflinching and anatomically accurate three-dimensional work could be placed just as easily, though less romantically, in the tradition of the vanitas, a genre with a long history and ...”

“... training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus young – and then countless millions of us crowding round to watch the footage?’ So far as Mount’s own religious views are concerned, I finished the book with as much uncertainty as I began it. But his attack on Dawkins et al for their fundamentalist atheism ...”

“... necessaries of life’; the ‘idle’ poor, who could but wouldn’t work; and the old, ill or young who were ‘impotent’ and therefore deserving. In all three categories there were people who navigated what has been called the ‘makeshift economy’ and ‘mixed economy’ that underpinned welfare: charity, loans, pawn shops, casual ...”