“... as Hugh Casson later wrote, was ‘a performance’. Few people felt they knew what lay behind it. John Betjeman knew more than most and was probably Lancaster’s closest friend. They met at Oxford and soon realised that they shared a sense of humour and a passion for architecture which was the basis of an enduring friendship. When Betjeman became assistant ...”

“... to him, he had given W.H. Auden his first reading of The Waste Land; had been the only witness as Evelyn Waugh was ‘received’ into Holy Mother Church; had been saluted by Edith Sitwell as the hope of English poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in ...”

“... to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what the subject was ...”

“... that was characteristic of Spark from the beginning. As a result, she was often bracketed with Evelyn Waugh, who helped to promote her early novels and, according to Stannard, ‘told his children to protect her because she was a saint’. Posh Catholics, Tory anarchists and American anglophiles of related leanings still make up part of her ...”

“... his intellectual commitment to incarnation, he was liable also to question material reality. John Heath-Stubbs quotes him as saying that ‘the most difficult thing in the world … is to realise that other people exist.’ He was capable of writing both an ode in praise of shitting and a poem in which such everyday acts as washing oneself become infused ...”

“... these conferences. Jessica Mitford had just sold a million copies of The American Way of Death and Evelyn Waugh had already weighed in with The Loved One and talk had turned at cocktail parties to ‘barbaric rituals’ and ‘morbid curiosities’. The mortuary associations were scrambling for some cover. Clergy and educators and psychologists – the new ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... than the palace of 101 hearths – ‘the most magnificent house in England’, according to Evelyn – with which the Earl of Clarendon had sought to dignify Piccadilly. Chandos had to abandon two half-built houses dominating Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other ...”

“... literary achievement. His ‘failure’, if it can be called such, lay in undervaluing his gifts. John Jay Chapman blamed Adams and his fellow ‘dilettanti’ for admiring America too much and despising her too much: ‘They could not help bowing the knee to success, though they did so with a sneer upon their lips.’ The letters bear him out. Adams made ...”

“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... staffer of the Eye and co-published by the Eye. Reviewers? Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the ...”

“... in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.) One of my favourites is My Friend Maigret, set on the island of ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... a reviewer is that of the gruff history master. He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will sometimes ...”