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“... an enormous room.’ It’s one of the great historical putdowns: the patrician Whig punchline to Kenneth Clark’s scrutiny of Counter-Reformation art and architecture in his incomparable TV series Civilisation, before he turns from the camera and walks away down the considerable length of the Map Room in the Vatican, an Englishman abroad. His stroll is ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... his father’s mistress, which may have had something to do with the tragedy that followed. The young man went to the Magazine Room, where he shot himself in the head with a Derringer pistol, then reloaded and did it again. This led to a quarter of an hour’s hiatus in library services while the dying member was discreetly removed to Charing Cross Hospital ...”

“... as nice as he looks.’ In that mode of feline understatement, nothing can overtake the words of Kenneth Clark (who was all eyes), that ‘Cyril was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort ...”

“... a portrait of the man who is both the centre and the missing middle of the story.In America the young Binghams were looked after by wealthy connections of their parents, the Brady Tuckers, who ‘lived like Astors’ with ‘three major houses’ and behaved with ‘generosity unbounded’. Winters in New York, summers in Florida, tennis and swimming and ...”

“... one reason alone: class. He could have been an English gentleman. The person he most resembles is Kenneth (Civilisation) Clark.19 August. Genuinely saddened last thing tonight by R. saying that Tom Daley hasn’t even reached the diving finals in Rio. He’s about the only competitor I cared about, feeling that for all his lustrous looks he’s had a ...”

“... for the ‘puritanism’ of his judgments, was surely right that the praise lavished on the very young poet had not exactly helped to curb the self-advertising, self-indulgent strain in his writing. Certainly, success came early and came hot. His contributions to Oxford Poetry (in 1929, when he was 20) were singled out for praise by metropolitan ...”

“... Rehearsing his part in a production of The Birthday Party at Scarborough, the young Alan Ayckbourn asked Harold Pinter for a little more information about the fictional character. Pinter said: ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’ It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point ...”

“... bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in the final volume on the novelist’s feelings for young men like Jocelyn Persse and Hendrik Andersen – but ‘a living spark, an emotional presence’. ‘One feels afterward that one still doesn’t know James,’ Hall complained, and he set out to remedy this lack by arguing that ‘the peculiar void at the ...”

“... Cubism and the occasional forays into realism, Dalí was as awkward and derivative as a hungry young artist should be. Visually speaking (for the monotonous ‘meanings’, if such they are, have been done to death), there was a spiky ungainliness or irritability that was gradually to be dissolved as though in a rich puddle of oil. Between 1927 and ...”

“... for the favours of Demos, a near senile stand-in for the Athenian populace and thus hardly a young kalos. Politics, class and sex are fused in a hilarious allegory of rival gift-giving, prostitution and hypocrisy. Jokes about sodomy and sodomised politicians abound. The Knights is not an isolated case. As Skinner rightly observes, in ...”

“... impulses of an evil empire’. He introduced those final thoughts with the story of ‘a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California’: ‘I love my little girls more than anything,’ Reagan said he said, but ‘I would rather see my little ...”

“... him minister of justice; another, on ‘African socialism’, appeared a few issues later. Kenneth Kaunda published on the future of democracy in Africa at roughly the moment he became the first president of Zambia. By the mid-1960s, Transition was the locus of an ever-widening regional conversation, from Achebe on ‘English and the African ...”

“... certainly got the memo. ‘The BBC,’ she complained in a letter to the then minister of health, Kenneth Robinson, ‘are determined to do everything in their power to present promiscuity as normal.’Up the Junction, based on a book by Nell Dunn, was the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony ...”

“... gave him entry into the milieu of student revolt; she noted his ‘great need to kowtow to the young’. He became a Maoist and went on to make – no longer as an individual artist but as a member of the Dziga Vertov group, named after the pioneering Soviet documentarist who was then being rediscovered – several films forswearing the aesthetic in favour ...”