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“... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...”

“... it. His anti-critical sentiment is signalled by his aggressively unfashionable title. ‘The old gentleman who reads Trollope for the characters’ has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish ...”

“... will content her and not hurt you ... Your wife has no occasion to feel jealous of you. You are a gentleman and you don’t want food unless it is flavoured right and served in a proper dish. If you do it once to a woman you will do it a great many times, for two reasons, first because you don’t want variety and second because she could not possibly gain ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”

“... a major field for contemporary epic and romance. In his really excellent book, After the Raj, David Rubin makes clear, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulties for a novelist of seizing what he can use and handle from that enormous area, and possessing it as his own ‘world’. It is here that the Celtic magic, if it can be conjured up, has its great ...”

“... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...”

“... in conventional attitudes and with perfect decorum, not touching Saint Dominic (although the gentleman beside them clutches his habit) and not presuming to address the Virgin directly. If the painting was rejected, which seems probable, it is more likely to have been rejected by the clergy than by the congregation, but if the evidence of the controversy ...”

“... he could plead self-defence, but such a plea from an illegitimate idle vagrant who had stabbed a gentleman would hardly have been listened to at Bow Street. He was also guilty of what the Enquiry calls ‘a high Offence against the Public Good’ for failing to initiate a prosecution against the impoverished highwayman who attempted to hold him up. The ...”

“... Stephen Switzer, one of the first promoters of the picturesque style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”

“... Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand . . . ‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was ...”

“... involved. Then he closed the door on erotic life altogether. He’d learned how to be an elderly gentleman who behaves correctly. He’d joined the ranks of the sexually abdicated. I say: ‘I think I’ve worshipped at the altar of Eros long enough. I think my dues are paid.’ ‘Wait till you go well and truly to sleep where the body forks. A great ...”

“... in browsing through it derives from that. But Cotgrave can nod. He blandly translates as ‘Gentleman’ the Rabelaisian portmanteau word Janspillommes, which packs gentilhommes into gens-pille-hommes (‘pillagers of men’)! He did not feel obliged to list au-cul-passion –Rabelais’s fundamental deformation of occupation. Rabelais was a master of ...”

“... main influence on the boy came from the maternal side. Disdainful of his father, a simple country gentleman whose sole interests were hunting, shooting and fishing and the conversation that goes with these pursuits, the boy received the first impulses toward the study of art during his visits to Redmond Manor. Here his grandfather had assembled an excellent ...”

“... Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 Walker added six new ...”