“... perfectly lobbed and beautifully returned over the social net, inaugurates a play in which: 1. The butler always has the last, crisp word. 2. Young men stutter cretinously when left alone with the adored object. 3. Country houses (‘How many bedrooms? Well, that point can be cleared up afterwards’) are an essential retreat from the cares of Mayfair and ...”

“... be remembered what Ernest was sent there for: he was to be subject to therapeutic ‘crossing’, Butler’s transference of the term from physical to psychological or, if you like, spiritual genetics. He was, in a word, to renew his soul in encounter with a being other than himself. (If another association of ‘cross’ with healing occurred to ...”

“... of his stairs wearing the red leather slippers and grey cardigan that meant he was off duty. ‘Christopher,’ he greeted me in a kindly voice. ‘Hello, sir,’ I said, with a vague sense of relief that I wasn’t to be punished. He was holding the telephone receiver. ‘It’s your father on the telephone.’‘...”

“... as a working rationalisation will have an indispensable quotient of solid reason. Mother, Penelope Butler at nearly seventy, is keeping a journal; her 49-year-old daughter, Rosemary (‘there’s rue’), is reading it, agog, jeering, indignant, interruptive. It tells of the ordinary sorrows of man’s – and more particularly of woman’s – life. Being ...”

“... the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in his three volumes of plans, plates and commentary, acclaimed our Ned as ‘the greatest artist in building whom Britain has produced’. Lutyens’s star ...”

“... under caution, and there is still a chance that Blair will be too. When it was revealed that Sir Christopher Evans, the venture capitalist founder of Merlin Biosciences, had been arrested and questioned about his £1 million loan before the 2005 election, he said: ‘The reason I made the loan was precisely because I was not prepared to make such a ...”

“... are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in politics. He despised Rab Butler for not having fought (he had a withered hand after a riding accident as a child), he sneered at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a ...”

“... Bellow’s claim to his own royalties. C.W.E. Bigsby also sounds mechanical when he quarrels with Christopher Lasch over narcissism: ought it to be diagnosed as the vice of the Seventies, since Joe Orton’s work proves that it was endemic in the Sixties? Here literature illuminates sociology, rather than the other way about. Other contributors to the series ...”

“... talking about it were part of a particular historical moment: the moment of army education, of the Butler Act, of Penguin, of Leavisism. Inglis’s gloominess about the state of the media and public life in contemporary Britain suggests that he doubts whether it is possible any longer to speak from the position of cultured authority that Hoggart occupied from ...”

“... a novel reader, but there was modesty in the disclaimer. He listed Jane Austen, Proust and Samuel Butler as the three authors who had helped him most, adding that Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do’. He named Dante, Gibbon and Tolstoy the greatest of writers and repeatedly ...”

“... return. His posting has come to an end, and, having bidden farewell to his colleagues and sobbing butler at the legation, he and Vita will go on to England via Baghdad. (Arriving at Long Barn, he will be physically sick from the high emotion of it all.) In his luggage, the reader has been told, he carries the proofs of his latest book, Some People, which ...”

“... it’s preceded by an unexpected, Ian Fleming-like sequence with a turn from a violent butler. Banville has some fun giving Clare an Irish background. ‘Look at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses ...”

“... hard to avoid, is still an asset, just as it was in the days of matinées and tea-trays, with the butler coming to answer the phone as the curtain rises, but today’s familiar device is to cause a predictable bewilderment, to embarrass, disturb or offend. Fifty years ago, or even further back, the play had already become a highly specialised form of artistic ...”

“... a poem – that we can never read one without recalling the other – also works for anthologies. Christopher Ricks’s splendidly discriminating Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) looks different now, along with the textbooks by Abrams and Bloom that McGann has more obviously targeted: less natural, less historical, less comprehensive and less ...”

“... he was to survive; as it was, for lack of commissions, they write, he was forced to let go of his butler and maid. Nevertheless, Mies remained in Germany long after Gropius and Breuer, who had both moved to London by 1935, and, for many architectural historians, his work under Nazism infects his later buildings. Don’t his corporate monoliths, symbols of a ...”