“... fantasy. Generally speaking, the English upper middle classes are more reserved than, say, Robin Williams, but this is more a matter of their prep schools than their genes. To reject this claim in anti-stereotyping spirit is an excuse not to do something about the prep schools. English sangfroid has much to do with how you should treat colonials, and ...”

“... of her book and who played so prominent a role in Nazi Germany was English: Winifred Marjorie Williams, born in Hastings in 1897. Orphaned at an early age, she came to stay in Oranienburg, near Berlin, with distant relatives, the aged Wagnerians Henriette and Karl Klindworth, in 1907. Karl had studied with Liszt, founded a conservatoire and written piano ...”

“... If Britons wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...”

“... first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by coach with four horses to London, to my Lord’s house in Covent-Guarden. But, Lord! what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town. And porters every where bow to us; and such begging of beggars! And a delightfull thing it is to see the towne ...”

“... began to attract celebrities to its dancefloor, where everybody was doing the Twist. Tennessee Williams, Merle Oberon and Noël Coward were regulars. Norman Mailer did the Twist with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. High society enjoyed slumming it, and the socialites, sailors and salesmen sweated it out together in the noisy ...”

“... piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by identifying him – correctly – as a former communist. He rarely lets a response to a piece he has written go ...”

“... undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was living well at the time on ‘Grandfather’s tick’, as he called his inheritance; but Linda was ‘rich-rich’. She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted ...”

“... Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ‘British’ culture, rather than one badged as ‘English’. In the wake of Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse (first published ...”

“... in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he speculates ...”

“... 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the combination of class ...”

“... culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their early teens can expect to suffer rape or attempted rape in their lifetimes, and most ...”

“... when a public occasion required a poetical response. Whether the occasion was the death of Dylan Thomas or the 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”