“... kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in Dublin. The tone is oddly like that of someone who is eager to reassure an older sister of his orthodox sexual ...”

“... Katie Roiphe was writing a piece about it for Harper’s. Twenty years ago, when I worked for George magazine, I’d commissioned Roiphe to write about the report written by Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who had presided over the investigations into what had gone on in the Clinton White House – Lewinsky, Whitewater, Travelgate etc. Moira ...”

“... of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s ...”

“... general election approaches, both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to further austerity. George Osborne has made clear that under a Tory government ‘fiscal consolidation’ will be maintained until 2019 at least. Where further savings and cuts – roughly £55 billion over the next parliament, ‘cuts on a colossal scale’ according to the ...”

“... 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan spinning his cane, Paolo Garretto’s Babe Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and ...”

“... In his later years he lost many of the friends he had, except the most right-wing ones and King George V, who found Kipling the only literary figure he could get on with at all. He lost them not only because of his own reactionary views, but also because of the mood they put him in – of dark, unattractive pessimism – and the way he expressed them, often ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West ...”

“... seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to ...”

“... critics, the dictionary includes pieces from the Marxist Noel Burch, the ‘auteur’ theorist Andrew Sarris, the nouveau romancier Claude Ollier and the avant-gardist P. Adams Sitney. And yet, as Roud confesses, ‘this work is less an objective survey than a covert statement, a normative view of the art of the film.’ Roud lists his own ...”

“... and inhuman – Argentines never seem to have achieved anything apart from statistical series. Andrew Graham-Yooll’s A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina’s Nightmare (of which a shorter version was published as Portrait of an Exile in 1981) is a series of sketches that do not offer explanations, but which do memorably convey the singular awfulness of ...”

“... from images of the War in its first years: black-out blinds, allotments, digging for victory,‘George Formby’s uke’, those wrought iron railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems ...”

“... Nabokov: His Life in Part was published. A few months before he died, he gave an interview to George Feifer fulminating at Field as the treacherous ‘Mr X’, his would-be biographer and the purveyor of ‘enormous blunders’. By 1977 Field was no longer the privileged biographer he had been in 1967. Nor is he so privileged in his 1987 book (which, as ...”

“... exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe ...”

“... historian I was seeking existed and had already begun to make his presence felt. In 1966 George Stocking had argued (in ‘On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of the Behavioural Sciences’) that anthropology could not be said to have a proper history at all until it was no longer conducted as a game of ...”

“... he married Adelaide Howard Childs. He acquired a landscape by the French-born, Pittsburgh-based George Hetzel (1826-99) and a genre piece by Luis Jiménez Aranda (1845-1928) depicting fashionable ladies distracted by a nude statue in the Louvre. His decision to buy the Aranda (now in the Frick Pittsburgh, the museum’s sister institution) may have been ...”