“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’ Quite right.Darwin freely confessed to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of ...”

“... the Fringe some time in 1961. Included in the show was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not sure that this in itself would have caused offence: it shouldn’t have as, like all successful parodies, there was a good deal of ...”

“... cultural change can ever be fully explained. ‘We prove, we do not explain our birth,’ Marianne Moore said. There is always an element of the random in the historical which demands respect. If Shakespeare himself was a romancing artist, old-fashioned beside sophisticated and newly classicising contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him ...”

“... lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife ...”

“... portraits, paintings by Van Gogh and Magritte, and a few more difficult works, such as James Ensor’s Mariage des masques.Paintings that documented the West’s preoccupation with the East were a productive theme: Matisse’s mysterious Persian Woman; Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Print; a photograph of Edward Lane in Persian ...”

“... theories were almost invariably referred to as ‘fashions’. His was the world of Russell and Moore, Peirce and James, a bit of Carnap here, the odd mention of Quine there. The famous radio dialogue with Copleston provides some choice moments. In it Ayer undertakes the difficult task of defending logical positivism ...”

“... integration than the Protestants had, but never pushed its views. O’Connor was prepared to meet James Baldwin in New York City but not in Georgia, where it would upset people (presumably white ones), something she could see no point in: ‘I observe the traditions of the society I feed on – it’s only fair.’ Sometimes she referred to the South as ‘a ...”

“... a style itself by now relatively antiquated (of the great Post-Modernist names – Charles Moore, for instance – very little survives here; even the more familiar ones, like Michael Graves, are relatively defamiliarised within this extraordinarily overpopulated meteorological zone). The 24 ‘works’ – project descriptions, actually – range from ...”

“... origins, indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding ...”

“... three likely to be from a public school or one of the grander grammar schools. But he was D.S.J. Moore and without it being the least bit ‘put on’ there was nothing in his voice to betray that he was from Dagenham. This may well have helped at Magdalen, which was at that time socially quite smart as well as being academically grand, and though in later ...”

“... the 1970s, when it was new. Not long ago he sent me a video by the Conservative housing spokesman, James Cleverly. Cleverly, in beige trousers and a blue blazer, a handkerchief tucked in the top pocket, addresses the camera as he strolls down one of the smart new alleys of Elephant Park, past sleek blocks of biscuit-coloured brick. ‘This is Heygate ...”

“... of the comment on Fielding and Hamidullah in A Passage to India: they regretted the death of Mrs Moore, ‘but they were middle-aged men, who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance.’ Furbank, who of course knew the Merz story, deals with it in half a page, but Mrs Beauman, or ...”

“... their working-class icons, brushing over the proletarian iconography of more recent events: Bobby Moore, fine; Arthur Scargill, not so much. A new type of post-Thatcherite celebrity-as-superfan emerged, typified by Chris Evans and Keith Allen, characterised by the depth of their love for music, football and money.A kind of industrialised fandom took off just ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”