“... of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George ...”

“... Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was good on children, especially the anxieties of the very young. She was good, too, on the mixed moods of life, less commonly found in fiction: the nostalgia of adolescence in Dusty Answer, or, much later in The Echoing Grove, the interplay of habit and passion when a married couple fall asleep in the middle of a ...”

“... internal committee was created to determine the party’s response to it, and a group of vigorous young Conservative MPs, in the shape of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC), made a name for themselves by attacking the government for their timidity towards its implementation.Here the postwar Conservative Party can be seen taking shape. Alexander Macdonald, a ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... who would pay the price of its not being noticed? Whites? In his Introduction to Colour Conscious, David Wilkins observes that the white citizens of America and Britain mostly don’t see themselves as having a race. Their culture is just ‘British culture’ or ‘American culture’ or, unselfconsciously, simply the way things are. Wilkins, Appiah, Gutmann ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... that the revolution at the Portrait Gallery had already begun under Strong’s predecessor, David Piper (who went on to become director of the Fitzwilliam and later the Ashmolean Museums). Piper had, after all, sponsored Strong’s first ‘theatrical’ exhibition, ‘The Winter Queen’, while he was still a junior keeper, encouraged him to start ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... claims to rule. It was a threat that was finally removed when, after Cleopatra’s death, young Caesarion, too, who had been (sensibly) making for India, was quickly dispatched. The second problem lay in the dynamics of the triumphal procession itself. This was partly the thorny question of how to incorporate Cleopatra into the ceremony and its ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”

“... that they will find not only deeds brave and chivalrous, but ‘cowardyse, murdre, hate’. The young knights in search of a ‘New Vision’ whom Campbell discovers in wartime New York City – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr – all land in mental hospitals by the age of 30. The loyal boy-gang that develops out of their errant-undergraduate ...”

“... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... projects for London alone suggest, no architect of his stature is more civic-minded. Although young by architectural standards in 1971, Rogers had several years of practice behind him. A graduate of the Architectural Association, he attended Yale in 1961-62 with Norman Foster; the two were in partnership, together with their spouses, until 1967. Hard ...”