“... Bentwoods answerable for the decay that surrounds them? And why does everyone Sophie meets, from a young couple at a cocktail party – the boy in ‘an army fatigue jacket’ and the girl in a white leather suit – to the old woman from whom she tries to buy an omelette pan, treat her with such awful condescension? These are not comfortable questions, and ...”

“... in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at last. But reading his letters in a new century makes the brave efforts at sexual enlightenment seem sadder than they once did, while ...”

“... director of an ‘ultra-smart’ advertising firm, he was ‘surrounded by highly educated, witty young men who had been at Eton together’ (they were also ‘kind’ and ‘generous’ and he enjoyed their company ‘immensely’, he later recalled; the narrators of his novels are more acerbic). He ‘took the social atmosphere of that sleek and shiny ...”

“... at the British Council in 2004 he appreciatively cited Goodhart along with Melanie Phillips and Roger Scruton in a disquisition on the ‘core values of Britishness’ (‘There is indeed a golden thread that runs through British history of the individual standing firm for freedom and liberty against tyranny’). On a trip to East Africa the following ...”

“... by asking whether it was appropriate for the signatories of the letter to teach impressionable young adults. The claim that the left has shut down ‘free speech’ on immigration and race has been widely aired, and some will see the Conway Hall row as yet more evidence supporting that claim. Others might see two media-savvy academics and a cranky ...”

“... two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured Sabar that with some minor revisions the HTR would go ahead and publish, which in due course it did.Hell hath no fury like a journalist deceived. Four years later, after the text’s claims to ...”

“... during the battle. Under an apple tree in Cassino, Melville placed a cigarette in the mouth of a young man who’d been shot. ‘He took two drags and then he died. Imagine, springtime in the Italian countryside … and here is this young man dying at twenty. Reality always surpasses cinema in war films.’ Demobilised in ...”

“... heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire ... and you can’t stop him either. Who started him? Roger Garaudy, it seems, with an inviting bet in 1954: ‘Let’s try and explain the same character, I according to Marxist methods, you according to existentialist methods.’ So began a project whose aim Sartre expresses on the first page of The Family Idiot ...”

“... of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an English Turandot’. But he had better sustain that interest, since this is only the first of two projected volumes on the subject, ‘the book ...”

“... muralist. By 1981, when his first book was finally published, his ‘portrait of the artist as a young Scot’ was called Lanark, as was its wheezy, skin-shedding hero. The book was a critical and popular sensation and changed the place of Glasgow in the world for ever. Not that Glasgow in the 1980s wasn’t changing anyway. In 1983, ...”

“... sensational ‘Olympia’ the year before, or was aware that the artist had recently acquired a young mistress called Camille Doncieux, whose face and form had served for the woman in green. But by simultaneously proclaiming her immortal and obliterating her identity, the critic effectively summed up her fate. Camille might pass for a portrait, but The ...”

“... as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing and mutilating three young women in 1990. Fraser has a personal stake, in other words, in solving the conundrum. She has a solution, too: a remarkably simple one on the face of it, namely the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region ...”

“... and in fact was corrected by dicta of his on other occasions, as when he wrote: ‘If you paint a young girl, youth should scent the room: a thinker, thought should be in the air; an aroma of the personality.’ This is certainly true of his Cicely Alexander and Carlyle portraits, and one is astonished that Roger Fry could ...”

“... attitude towards her heroine adopted by such right-royal writers of an earlier generation as Roger Fulford. And she is no less critical of the condescending tone that characterised Aspinall’s highly selective edition of Mrs Jordan’s letters, which also unduly influenced subsequent writers (notably Brian Fothergill) who depended on them. Above ...”