“... sculpture for the Italian Renaissance, there was an unruliness in Turner and Constable, as against Wilson, say, which made them radically transform rather than imitate their model. They took Claude’s compositions as theatres within which to work out their personal obsessions. Turner bombarded scenes out of Claude with brilliant light, at once decomposing and ...”

“... they had no political base in the Conservative Party, nowhere to resign to. They were (like Wilson and Callaghan) associated with the apparently failed doctrines of the Seventies in a party, and indeed in a country, where TINA now had many admirers.The second of these issues concerns dogma itself. The working assumption of the book, as its title ...”

“... imperialist’ by student types and disparaged for his ‘tendency to sonorous padding’. Yet Michael Holroyd’s work on Strachey has stirred up hearsay and a sense of a coming ‘age of documentation’; at Corley, a fallen ceiling affords a glimpse of camp Victorian splendours. When Paul snoops round Two Acres in his role as a biographer, he pisses in ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by ...”

“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names. 17 ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary ...”

“... religion led to the discontinuance of many lock hospitals and to an attack on what Bishop Daniel Wilson called the ‘licensed brothels’ which made ‘sinning safe’. The health of the troops aroused renewed concern after the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny had resulted in large numbers of men being sent overseas. Florence Nightingale’s demonstration that ...”

“... to end in a cathedral town among public school men’. This is preceded by a quotation from Angus Wilson on Drood which does not really help the discussion, for the point surely is not that the cathedral town and public school are being opposed to urban and industrial England, but that anomalies and mysteries exist in supposedly benign environments. The evil ...”

“... central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or near ...”

“... over the last few years and recalling the Eye’s successive attitudes to Macmillan, Home, Wilson and Heath might be astonished at how lightly Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet of yes-men have got off. But then the Eye’s current self-image – of stout, no-nonsense, undeceivable conservative Englishness – isn’t so very far away from that of the Prime ...”