“... While I was having a weekly supervision from Richards, in my final year, I was listening to the James Smith group, who favoured T.S. Eliot and Original Sin. After each of his supervisions, as I remember, though I had enjoyed and learned from them enormously, I would goad the enemy by reporting some theologically absurd remark, typical of an expert on ...”

“... Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and more than a touch of Henry James. In a letter to her father, Lawrence wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is different. He ignores ...”

“... judges were long ago steered away from wigs by Thomas Jefferson, who, having visited Westminster Hall, reported: ‘We must not have men sitting in judgment who look like mice peeping out of oakum.’ The Bar of England and Wales will have to decide whether to wear wigs to address now bareheaded benches, and what they decide will either amplify or silence ...”

“... book would have to be written on a laptop that had no internet access. When I arrived at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his ...”

“... they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, a hall of residence for Woolwich Polytechnic and two blocks as part of that comprehensive redevelopment of Gospel Oak. All these buildings have been in the guide at one time or another, although Woolwich Poly’s halls, noted for their ‘search for a lost ...”

“... only interesting but plausible and even convincing. One, however, is not, an episode known as the Hall-Mills murder case, which unfolded in the newspapers over many months. The double killing of an Episcopal minister and his lover occurred on the night of 14 September 1922, a few days before Fitzgerald and his wife arrived in New York. A social gulf separated ...”

“... the many other times when leavis wanted to put someone down, the model for his prose was Henry James, than whom no stylist could be more ornate and mandarin. If he wished to Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality of ...”

“... from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote about each picture painted by Brooks, her long-term ...”

“... Jane Brown has worked hard to fill in the gaps. She has found out that his mother was Ursula, née Hall, and that she was, like his father William, from a local family in Northumbria. She has also uncovered suggestive evidence that Brown had an illegitimate daughter, for whom he provided after his death. Otherwise, the biographical narrative remains ...”

“... was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings twice, surging through Chandler, Faulkner, film noir, the extraordinary novels of Chester Himes and on towards Rechy, Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. Davis acutely points out that noir – dystopian revulsion at the ...”

“... Peto took 7 Collingham Gardens himself) lived like merchant princes. (Gilbert hung hams in the hall fireplace.) House plans did not change very much, but mansion flats brought new demands; among the most interesting of the many excellent drawings are those showing the hydraulic lift in Abingdon Mansions. Contemporary photographs of the Underground stations ...”

“... when, invited to choose the galleries for his show, he had insisted that they include the towering hall down the middle of the Tate, an absolute graveyard for sculpture. As to the purpose of the improvised studio, it was much more specific than Lord realises. It was needed for the making of new versions in plaster of the figurines in Four figurines on a tall ...”

“... Parliament had been rejected, he exhibited two of his massive historical paintings in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The public flocked to the building, but to see the midget, General Tom Thumb, who was being shown downstairs. On the first day Haydon attracted only four visitors. ‘I would not have believed it of the English people,’ he wrote in his ...”