“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... were required, wrote Kermode: ‘opinion’, in the form of a felt need, on the part of Burne-Jones, Swinburne and Walter Pater, for a certain kind of early Renaissance art; ‘knowledge’ (that is to say, solid art-history), since Pater and co got a great deal wrong – for instance, the ‘cadaverous’ colour so admired by Pater in The Birth of Venus ...”

“... poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed them. Hilton said he found Graham’s poems ‘too obscure’, provoking a remarkably ...”

“... E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or ...”

“... a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods. Fellow explorers described him as having an ‘indomitable will’ and ‘infinite resource’, a man ‘in hand to hand combat with the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American ...”

“... The soft image of black children fanning drowsy Southern belles beguiles, like a Burne-Jones painting commissioned by George Lincoln Rockwell. The whole works like an opera, complete with its overture and entr’acte. At first, it is the sweep of the movie that is so alluring and so suspect; the astounding unreality of it all immerses you. If you ...”

“... portray themselves.’ ‘If we are going to sin,’ the attorney-general of Kenya, Eric Griffiths-Jones, wrote to Governor Baring in 1957, ‘we must sin quietly.’ The significance of all this is difficult to assess. The record of British decolonisation is mixed. The ‘Empire into Commonwealth’ narrative isn’t complete nonsense. There were some ...”

“... of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in ...”

“... an intractable schoolboy. There is also a more genial side to the schoolboy dimension. Emrys Jones pointed out in a brilliant British Academy lecture how Pope’s dunces disport themselves like ‘children at play’, shouting, chattering, having peeing competitions and the rest, though none of this appears in Mr Grigson’s extracts. An analogous ...”

“... a peerless library, Greek and Roman sculptures, seventeen Raphaels and a garden designed by Inigo Jones. Denmark House, as Somerset House was called when occupied by Anne of Denmark, had a fountain thirty feet high and eighty feet wide: ‘a huge rocky re-creation of Mount Parnassus’, with a cavern containing the nine muses in marble and four streams ...”

“... who play ‘the mythical game of time’. An Occidental Haroun, he wears a broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat. He’s a role player, a trans-dimensional tourist. Hence the language. ‘Pard’, according to Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has no existence outside the fictionalised Wild West. Moorcock is like one of those local library researchers from ...”

“... anecdotes (asked by a snobbish girl how he planned to spend the summer, the novelist James Jones replied, ‘I’m having my asshole sewed up to see if I can shit through my armpits’) and inane puns (apropos a prostitute: ‘one swallow does not a slummer make’). Worse are the gossipy reveries about former lovers delivered with a minty blend of ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for ...”

“... vanished into thin air, both victims of the metastatic crisis in mortgage securities. The Dow Jones plunged five hundred points on 15 September, its worst day since 9/11, and nearly another five hundred two days later, even though the US government had bailed out the insurance giant AIG the day before in yet another act of socialised capitalism whereby ...”

“... that lasted until the spell of the south, especially that of the ‘spirit-deadening’ Inigo Jones, was finally broken. Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more ...”