“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”

“... and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had. Dora Carrington was born in 1893, the daughter of an engineer in the East Indian ...”

“... on the university novel, explores the intricate web of relationships which form around Mina Cook, an undergraduate at a fictional Oxford college.Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), the fifth novel Trevelyan published, is something else again. Robert Thomas, recently graduated from the School of Chemistry and Mathematics at London University, gets a ...”

“... ten members of the family who got chapters to narrate, leaving his successors absolutely free to cook up a plot – something to do with the daughter’s engagement – between them. A ‘Friend of the Family’ would provide the concluding chapter. The only formal framework was the timetable of authors and characters (determined in considerable part by the ...”

“... letters like the one to Hilton until the correspondence of the late 1930s and early 1940s with Eleanor Clark, an American writer he had an affair with. The letters to her are long, often funny – they make you wish you could read her replies. She presses him to be more dogmatic in his beliefs, and in a letter written during a bombing raid he tells her ...”

“... The biographical work that has been done on Wharton since 1975, for instance by Cynthia Wolff, Eleanor Dwight and Shari Benstock (who is at pains in her book to correct some inaccuracies by Lewis) is barely mentioned, as if no one existed in this contest over Fullerton except Lewis and Mainwaring. It is as curious a story of slow-burning, obsessional ...”

“... of 16, which is unremarkable except that next to Hübner (and also in the Volkssturm) is Peter Cook. He is looking at Goebbels with the ghost of a smile and is much as he was around 1970, his face angular and handsome which it was before the drink took hold. Perhaps to someone who hadn’t known him the resemblance would seem less remarkable. To me it’s ...”

“... by a stoic idealism, and New York’s journalists found him irresistible. (Sometimes literally: Eleanor Norman of the New York Post sent him flowers and tried to seduce him.) He sat for a portrait by Cecil Beaton, in which he looked upwards, his face illuminated as if he were an angel. Five days after his arrival, A.J. Liebling interviewed him at his hotel ...”