“... been lucky to survive the Revolution. Like Tocqueville he is educated by the family priest. As a young man he becomes a magistrate (like Tocqueville) and engages in much political soul-searching, torn between loyalty to the royalist cause and his growing sympathy for liberal ideas. Like Tocqueville, he witnesses the July Revolution of 1830 and escapes danger ...”

“... biscuits from the same years depict these new products of plenty as both perfect and null, and his young man in a tennis sweater is beautiful and bland in a similar way: the good life of the postwar period as the unexamined life of leisure and sport. Might the doubt raised in such paintings about a reconstructed West Germany extend to its quick embrace of ...”

“... sea-run adult will seek to return at least once in its life: an impulse that was confirmed by Francis Bacon in the 1620s, when he tied ‘a Ribband or some known tape or thred’ around the tail of a sea-bound smolt, retrieving it the following year when the fish returned as a splendid silver grilse. ‘Smolt’, ‘grilse’: as Richard Shelton ...”

“... by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense of the city itself with its diverse population of recent immigrants, foreign merchants, and its notable Jewish community. The young Becket was proud of his roots. An example ...”

“... really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re wounded!’ ‘Nay,’ the soldier’s pride ...”

“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”

“... The earliest here were made in 1993-99 and present her own furious portrait of the artist as a young woman. A gaudy jumble of colours and scripts, with cut-out wonky capitals, salvaged and embroidered emblems, and patched pieces of journals and private messages, these are powerful works, assembled at the slow speed of handicraft to communicate cris de ...”

“... manifestly, an Edinburgh figure: born there, schooled there, a city advocate, Kames’s protégé. Francis Jeffrey, a boy in 1790, once helped carry the intoxicated Boswell to bed. Next morning, on waking the hungover genius, Jeffrey’s head was patted. ‘If you go on as you’ve begun,’ said the bloated biographer, ‘you may live to be a Bozzy ...”

“... away from Jean Rhys, but in any case they would hardly have appealed to each other. When she was young she liked adventurers, and married one, but later in her long life she preferred gentle and gentlemanly types who wanted to cherish her, though they seldom or never succeeded. As Carole Angier acutely observes, she gravitated towards men with ‘social ...”

“... the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law … As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was ...”

“... and combative portrait with background (to annex Tom’s own title for his profile of Guy Burgess) Francis Wheen doesn’t consider the social-democratic aspect of oral and homosexual promiscuity as much as he does the allegedly crypto-Communist angle that has lately been superimposed upon it. A whole flock of mediocre scavangers, from Chapman Pincher to ...”

“... now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre Bonnard. Is he a Great Painter?’ Cahiers d’art asked at the time of his death in 1947. They decided he wasn’t and that only those whose taste was confined to the facile and pleasing would ...”

“... under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they have picked ‘all day’ at Chatwin’s insistence and which he has finicked down to an airy nothing. His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a ...”

“... guise, and so helps to reinforce it. They are end-of-history texts, fictional equivalents of Francis Fukuyama, which deny that reality could be transformed in the very act of proclaiming how it could be improved. The Island of Liberty (1848) shows an enlightened aristocrat carrying out an experiment in human equality on a South Sea island, a project ...”

“... being aware of the great love between Frances and Ralph, and feeling a certain fascination, young as I was, because this didn’t seem exactly like what I’d heard in the current pop songs. It was a force which is unsentimentally documented here: I sit writing with my back to the log fire which crackles softly and flicks tongues of light into the ...”