“... an absence of personal piety’. On the second, research might be possible. According to Robert Speaight’s account of Chesterton’s death, the Times printed what Belloc ‘rightly described as a “crapulous” obituary’, but there was a ‘noble tribute’ in the Observer – and it was by Belloc. Amusing stories, circulating without any ...”

“... band. And the best brass-player of his generation, a black called Cato, began his career as Sir Robert Walpole’s footman before being passed, like a favourite horse or dog, first to the Earl of Chesterfield and then to the Prince of Wales and his son, the future George III. The Louis Armstrong of Augustan England ended his days, apparently, as royal ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... Ford, Pennsylvania. The compositions are sparse, and often uneasily balanced. His paintings and Robert Frost’s poetry describe similar landscapes and characters. Frost has been better respected by critics, but Wyeth has advocates among the directors of famous American public galleries, and their patrons. The Helga Pictures is the catalogue of the ...”

“... In publishing his compendious work Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White gave currency both to a term and to a programme. His subtitle, ‘The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe’, indicated the broad area of his investigations, but gave little sense of the radical originality of this programme, which was quite simply the re-examination of historiography in its written form ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... it is fair to say that Hillary Clinton’s relationship to her husband reminds people of Robert Kennedy’s relationship to his brother: trusted adviser, companion, friend. It is striking that Hillary Clinton’s up-front influence is so threatening to an electorate which has had to face up to the realities of a Reagan Administration held hostage to ...”

“... peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time’. The Boer War provided plenty of scope for hooligans. The notorious celebrations ...”

“... the road, she drags herself along, semi-invited, to a New Year’s Eve party at the Skidelskys (‘Robert ... is a brilliant historian who was made a lord this summer’). Needless to say, none of these occasions turns out quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more ...”

“... plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of psychological insights, unravelling ...”

“... demanding, disorderly libraries (‘Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed’); they travel heavy, toting copies of ‘Die Griechischen Altertümer, Le Trésor de Sifnos, Alexander’s Path’. Their sad goings are marked by sly nods in the ...”

“... coat. She modelled for magazine covers and considered acting (though she eventually turned down Robert Bresson’s offer of a lead role). But she’d begun hoarding knives and razor blades under the mattress and in her handbag. ‘My psychic pain was like a giant rat trap,’ she wrote later, ‘an inner scream that would not stop.’ Two years after giving ...”

“... Lawrence, but 1998 was the high-water mark for asteroid anxiety, giving us both Deep Impact (Robert Duvall and a team of astronauts blow up the asteroid with nuclear weapons; it mostly works) and Armageddon (Bruce Willis and a ragtag band of oilmen blow up the asteroid with nuclear weapons; it works). In real life, even assuming it were possible to fire ...”

“... On Wednesday, 25 September 1661, we find him making his way from St Martin’s Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby: ‘He and I in his coach through the Mewes, which is the way that now all coaches are forced to go, because of a stop at Charing Cross, by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.’ He had been down that way the previous October, at St ...”

“... in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert Graves and about Keith Douglas with Edmund Blunden, the new professor of poetry. Poetry was both companionship and competition: ‘My own poems sounded hit-and-miss beside those of John Birtwhistle, who came up in my third year and stunned everyone at the ...”