“... three. We belonged to the Meritocracy, products of the school system set up in 1944 by the Butler Education Act. The ‘Honest Men’ of French’s title flourished in the atmosphere of grammar-school sixth forms, and some pessimists are suggesting that there is little market for their type in Britain any more. Philip French has produced an effective ...”

“... like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens of a size he thought small but we would consider reasonably large today. His love of the ‘gardenesque’ – a great variety of plants, planted as individual ...”

“... that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... to be found in its colonial past, or are they better located in the break with Britain? Jon Butler argues the former, Joyce Appleby the latter. Butler also wants to argue, however, that although a recognisably modern society took shape in America during the ‘provincial decades’ following initial colonisation ...”

“... In November​ 1981 at a function in London, Neville Butler, a professor of paediatric medicine at Bristol University, contrived to drop a cup of coffee at Margaret Thatcher’s feet. He stooped down to mop it up, then sprang up and asked her for money. ‘I’m Professor Butler,’ he’s reported to have said ...”

“... theorist. More information about the actual world of politics is available in a slighter book. John Tomlinson, a Labour MP who lost his seat in 1979, has collected a large ragbag of useful if undigested facts about the ultra-Right and ultra-Left movements in Britain and about their activities in recent years. Anyone seeking the genealogy of the rival ...”

“... died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at ...”

“... employment of, time, of alienation as amiability. Someone is coming to get you: The mailman or butler enters with a letter on a tray Whose message is to change everything, but in the meantime One is to worry about one’s smell or dandruff or lost glasses – If only the curtain-raiser would end, but it is interminable. But there is this consolation: If it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who, however, fatally lacked Peacock’s tenderness for women and his poetic grace. Marilyn Butler speaks, at one point, of his Mozartian sparkle. Mozart is indeed a source, The Marriage of Figaro especially, for Peacock’s mischievous spell: but she has far more to say about the formation of Peacock’s mind in a book which is erudite, searching, and ...”

“... with the properties of the present. ‘His nationalism tottered on the brink of racism,’ Hubert Butler noted in 1968, in one of the pieces assembled in Escape from the Anthill. Deane doesn’t go as far as this in his appraisal of the architect of 1916: but he does, astutely, connect Pearse’s Gaelic revivalism with ‘what used to be called “muscular ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... accessible only to those whose gender and class supposedly made them invulnerable to corruption. John Woodroffe (1865-1936) was typical of Britons with a penchant for Tantra: by day a judge on the Calcutta High Court, renowned for his severity, he was by night an ardent Tantrika, publishing translations and introductions under the pseudonym ‘Arthur ...”