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“... as a foundation for her future trade. But it will strike some as a piece of sentimentality. As James Baldwin put it in Nobody Knows My Name, ‘children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.’ That may be the brute reality of the situation: nobody ever gets ...”

“... in particular has attracted many devotees and imitators, professionals and poetasters alike. Clive James’s flashy verse-letters in his book Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ...”

“... centuries earlier – uncontaminated by later, particularly foreign, intrusions. ‘The Romans,’ James Davidson wrote recently in these pages, ‘were so thorough in forestalling the possibility of any actual heroics that might disturb the Roman peace that the dream-world of discourse was the only space left to the Greeks for great deeds’ (LRB, 23 ...”

“... nor the nickname is mentioned by Sir John in his autobiography.) We are regaled with details of James Pope-Hennessy’s fatal passion for rough trade. I was taken aback when, later in the book, Lord Weidenfeld is rebuked for recounting events at which he wasn’t present. When John Richardson was present one often has to wonder why or how he got where he ...”

“... about from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after Culloden ...”

“... sportsmen, to be following their father into the Army, to be real boys like their wholesome cousin Frank, are constant topics. At times Elsa lashes herself into frenzies of spite; at times, stalled by Oswald, or by the boys’ refusal to answer rudeness with rudeness, she mutters to herself, swearing and shaking her head about. At times she collects herself ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... the short story in Ireland has made an unexpected comeback. Earlier generations – that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society still in the process of inventing itself. If the novel dealt with ...”

“... past decades have not, strictly speaking, either claimed to be English or cared to be thought so. Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton are proud of their Manx, Welsh and Irish roots. As a result, each one’s journey from the periphery to the centre, from the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class core, from ...”

“... psychological idea,’ he added, ‘will have to be supplied by the viewer.’ To Frank Crotty, another journalist who inquired about the new picture’s name when Hopper showed him the canvas, Hopper replied: ‘Toots.’ According to Nivison, he later assured them that ‘Toots [is] not a bad sort. Just a lamb in wolf’s clothing.’ In the ...”

“... in pain. ‘White Americans know very little about pleasure because they are so afraid of pain,’ James Baldwin wrote, ‘but people dulled by pain can sing and dance till morning, and find no pleasure in it.’ Holiday’s bitter-sweetness – a cocktail of the rambunctious and the rueful – spoke to both sides of this conundrum. Although she was variously ...”

“... is it? These are the sorts of question that obsessed Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey in the early 20th century. Russell became a public figure of the kind that Kitcher approves; Wittgenstein is read by non-philosophers; and Ramsey was a pragmatist. Yet Kitcher implies that they were wrong to pursue such questions, which have no ...”

“... book is a magisterial study of a great popular artist: a full-scale interpretation of James Gillray’s output of satirical prints, and a biography that warrants comparison with the best ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail ...”

“... in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true that the Anglo-American political culture holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael ...”