“... word, they were ‘barbarians’. But his time as a North African proconsul had convinced him that white settlers were even worse, ‘the rag-tag sweepings of the scum of Europe, with an unhealthy admixture of decayed British aristocrats’, as Ball puts it. Salisbury became close to Rhodesia’s stalwart, Roy Welensky – an ex-boxer and engine-driver, an ...”

“... America. She was the designer of choice for intellectual and artistic women, the actress Arletty, Kenneth Clark’s wife Jane, and in fiction Muriel Spark’s girls of slender means, who shared one Schiaparelli dress between them. Her influence owed a great deal to the ease with which some, at least, of her work could be pirated, and she took imitation in the ...”

“... She also conducted services in the ruined chapel of her mother’s remote Hebridean island, Inch Kenneth, and enjoyed planning her own funeral (her gravestone, chosen by her mother, reads: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’). Having stalked Hitler for ages – she would sit at a table in his favourite restaurant, waiting, and shake uncontrollably as ...”

“... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...”

“... to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that relationship last?Taylor wades deep into the cigaretty fug of that small literary circle awash with till-boredom-do-us-part love affairs conducted in rented accommodation. (The love affairs were usually shorter than the ...”

“... But he relives very well the innocence and modesty of those years, of which the hard-nosed Sir Kenneth Berrill, later head of Margaret Thatcher’s Central Policy Review Staff, remarked: ‘We had won the war and we voted ourselves a nice peace.’ As Hennessy himself says, ‘the Britain of the early 1950s, for all the shortages and everyday rubbing ...”

“... prison reformer). After qualifying as a doctor, she went to New York to train as an analyst at the White Institute – ‘a revolutionary alternative to mainstream, orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis’, according to the institute’s official history – under the then renowned Harry Stack Sullivan. Where orthodox Freudian practice focused on the internal ...”

“... eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ... Kenneth Widmerpool! Adjustments made for the Wykehamist rather than the Eton style (Gaitskell, too, had been at Winchester), it has the tone of the power-votary and acquaintance-scraper to a T. The act was kept up until Gaitskell died, and its unfolding is not ...”

“... he thought was a scorching job on William Whitelaw, but chanced to run across him shortly after in White’s Club. The columnist confesses to being horrified. Presumably he would never attack a man he knew he was lunching with next week. But Whitelaw soon has him grovelling, by booming down the club staircase: ‘Hello John. You know, when my wife read what ...”

“... of depressive significance, perhaps the least convincing of which comes when Arbus chooses a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s ...”

“... when he was ten and she was seven: ‘What does she look like?’ he asks. ‘An old lady, white hair, in her eighties,’ I say. He smiles. ‘Everything changes,’ he says, ‘except the dead.’ Elsewhere a Russian dissident reminds us of Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, who cannot find it in himself to disbelieve his wife, though all the ...”

“... novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the book ...”

“... LOLLY. The doctrine remains: give money back to ‘the people’. The Sun constantly accuses Kenneth Clarke of timidity in his fiscal policy – the Chancellor’s November Budget was ‘as inspiring as a cod kipper’; and by attempting to push Major to the right using the rhetoric of the people’s hatred of being ‘shackled’ by the state it has ...”

“... in later centuries. Tragically, a painting often has to shed its frame to retain its lovers. Kenneth Clark, seeking to persuade the Trustees of the National Gallery to purchase Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier, had it removed from the florid gilt composition frame which the artist had probably selected (and possibly even designed) for it, fearing ...”

“... painting from Elaine de Kooning, Lightnin’ Hopkins in concert and a festival of poetry featuring Kenneth Koch, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Bly. Most fun of all, Barthelme organised an exhibition, New American Artefacts: The Ugly Show, which included all sorts of bits and pieces he’d found in junk shops: plastic flowers and fruit, a giant jar of ...”