“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately connected) Geoffrey Robinson, many more are encompassed by the allegations he raises – it is not just a matter of Peter Mandelson but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie ...”

“... immortals. The increasing datedness of the autodidact canon could itself become a handicap: the young V.S. Pritchett (though hardly working class in origin) dreamed of entering literary bohemia in the late 1910s, but ‘all my tastes were conventionally Victorian . . . I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob ...”

“... disjointed articles that often contained internal contradictions.’ Little wonder that Sir Robert Anderson of the Criminal Investigation Department said that enough nonsense was written about the Whitechapel murders to sink a dreadnought. As in the Palmer and Bravo cases, inquests were crucial in maintaining the level of excitement. The ...”

“... her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their magical adventures. The first is Five Children and It (1902) – the fifth child being their baby brother; ‘It’ being the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day ...”

“... at Architectural Review and a charter member of the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised ...”

“... studied the law with enough seriousness to land a pretty much ideal job for an ambitious young man in the late 16th century. After trying his hand as an adventurer and soldier in the Earl of Essex’s Cadiz expedition in 1596 and its embarrassingly useless sequel in 1597, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Keeper of the Great Seal. Donne ...”

“... South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his ...”

“... even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the ...”

“... supposed to love or even like Chagall.’ The so-called New York intellectuals, most of them young enough to have been Chagall’s sons, were suitably ambivalent. Irving Howe dismissed Chagall’s ‘softened and sweetened’ version of the shtetl. Harold Rosenberg was more tolerant in his condescension: ‘The distinction of Chagall’s ghetto ...”

“... of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one ...”

“... common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and ...”

“... a radical disjuncture but a return to the perfection of the primitive church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as ...”

“... of ‘savages beneath our white skins’ exhilarated him. He preferred H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, because their romances seemed to have a primitive gusto. Although Lang co-wrote a fantasy novel with Haggard, his most effective literary use of anthropology came in the form of The Blue Fairy Book and the other ...”