“... secretary Tory Dennistoun is connected, like almost everyone else in the book, to her own silver-lined and gloriously inevitable parenthesis: ‘Tory Dennistoun (now Lady Oaksey)’. Suffering from a sebaceous cyst Betjeman attended the Acland Nursing Home, and ‘he was nursed there by the historical novelist Mary Renault,’ the lucky thing: the ...”

“... queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and women, sometimes pictured in hexagonal stone baths, were used to represent substances undergoing dissolution or ...”

“... ceased to exert himself on behalf of his sister-in-law.Geoffrey’s great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which meant that Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle. Geoffrey was born in the spring of 1888 at Toxteth, where his father was principal of Liverpool College. His mother, one of the daughters of Thomas ...”

“... Late Call): so one admires Ms Lamming’s decision to build her story round a half-senile widower, Arnold Lawson, who has just moved into a new district and is exciting the curiosity of the local newspaper (‘Grand Old Eccentric Comes to Woodburn’). Lawson is a miser, hoarding books rather than cash, and the novel’s excellent jacket-picture by Emma ...”

“... novel be metamorphosed into the German shelling of Tietjens’ unit’, and ‘the extravagant silver service of the Duchemins will be conjured into the “candlestick”, a metal bar inside a shrapnel shell, which is to destroy Pte Morgan.’ Another virtue in his book is that it presents a comprehensive and coherent argument – one which demands, if you ...”

“... here, after a rain shower: new-fangled light, the slate roofs briefly caught in scale-nets of silver, then sheened with thin oils. These signals I take as apprehension, new aligned poetry with truth Hill’s sincere engagement with Christianity places him intellectually as far from most of his contemporaries as the Catholic Hopkins was from most of ...”

“... Greece. Try as Jowett might to reconcile the two moralities, they were soon put asunder. There was Arnold coining the terms ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Hellenism’, and there, more insidiously, was Pater defining a delectable hedonism in which the Greek passion for beauty was treated as a direct challenge to Protestant puritanism. Unlike the generations who ...”

“... and rule-governed, then the fact that I can’t read Treasure Island without visualising Long John Silver as a one-legged version of my grandmother is of interest only to my psychotherapist and myself. Richards’s thought here is bedevilled by the word ‘experience’, which tempts us to model non-sensory activities on sensory ones, as though reading a poem ...”

“... century BC, to Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, 1960); Adonis Nude (a sixth-century Greek statue to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, 1985); Adonis Clothed (2000 BC silver statuette from Aleppo to George Clooney, 2002); Portraits of Adonis (bronze head of Sargon from Akkad 2500-2000 BC to Denis Rodman c.1998 – no, I ...”

“... or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Francis Klingender. Yet it takes time for a new style of art history to spread from the centre to the periphery. It is only in the last few years, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Brown and some of his Spanish colleagues, such as Julian ...”

“... me to the Waverley novels three years before. I sat opposite him across a large mahogany desk with silver ornaments, and even now I can remember vividly the view over the shoulder of his dark, well-cut suit, through the conservatory, onto the large clump of purple rhododendrons on the lawn. I could sense the oncoming humiliation even before I heard him asking ...”

“... be organised also includes people dressed in simulated buckram and taffeta and the gleaming mock-silver of property breastplates and crowns, all of them borrowed from the second-best wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to deck out students and members of local amateur dramatic societies as representative characters from each of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats (really quite chic in their way – silver-blue with muscular lines) prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Muir, in his catalogue introduction, points out that Vogue’s inception coincided with Haig’s launch of the tank at the Battle of the Somme, which gives ...”

“... to them, the narrator gives him a few sous, his friend astonishes him and the beggar by giving a silver coin. The narrator tells his friend: ‘You’re right. The next best thing to receiving a surprise is giving one.’ The friend says the coin was counterfeit, but he still believes he’s done the right thing: he has created an event, a surprise, for the ...”

“... metal’, a practice condemned as unnatural, and even likened to sodomy. ‘Is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ ‘I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast.’ Shylock is against ventures precisely because they are risky. There is no doubt that this prominently placed bit of doctrine was meant to show that Antonio was right, though he seems to think ...”