“... to the town, or to the country? Would he have been more at home in Tolstoy or in Turgenev? What painter could have done justice to his appearance? How did he look at his best? On all these matters conflicting views were expressed, and, when it came to the last question, a dry, shrill voice, coming from a young man, rose to a peak: ‘I think Dad looks best ...”

“... Maugham is Of Human Bondage. It’s easy to see why post-1918 adolescents – including George Orwell – thrilled as the scales fell from the eyes of Philip Carey, the club-footed but otherwise Maugham-like student hero: It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... were then unsigned. Individual voices such as Updike’s – and, later, Jamaica Kincaid’s and George W.S. Trow’s – managed to peep up despite the magazine’s horse collar of wry urbanity. A volume of Updike’s Talk from the Fifties sits on my shelf, a memento of a metropolitan flâneur with notepad at the ready, sniffing in the sights.Updike went on ...”

“... novelists, such as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a ...”

“... lesbian salonnière Natalie Barney; Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s opium-addicted niece); Marie Laurencin, painter and friend of Picasso; the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention ...”

“... time when the study of ancient Ireland was becoming politically resonant. He became friendly with George Petrie, who had done much to revitalise the antiquities committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and was responsible for its acquisition of important Irish manuscripts. Wilde worked with Petrie in County Meath, north of Dublin, discovering the remnants of ...”

“... York, where Wyatt arrives after reading for the ministry and realising that his vocation is as a painter. In childhood he acquired the idea that originality was a sin, being a challenge to the Creator, and so he makes copies, starting with a supposedly authentic Bosch that his father brought back from Spain (claiming it was a fake). Wyatt slyly substitutes ...”

“... have at least some contacts in Society; but Mrs Bandman Palmer was free to be populist, like Lloyd George. For Joyce, she would be the New Woman at the top of her form: very unlike Molly, of course, but he needed a contrasting specimen. However, these social observations would not have disturbed him. One might think that a man so deeply (though not ...”

“... It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It ...”

“... Day-Lewis was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or ...”

“... thousand distinguished fashionables’. On 12 April, she was received at Carlton Palace by King George IV, who, it was reported, ‘expressed great pleasure at her appearance’. So many people came to see Crachami that she was soon exhausted. In fact, she may have died of exhaustion, though it was more probably TB. On Thursday, 3 June, she received more ...”

“... yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones ...”

“... choreography broke completely with the classical conventions of ballet. Nikolai Roerich, a painter and archaeologist, believed he had unearthed evidence of human sacrifice among the ancient Scythians, and this was used as the basis of the ballet, for which he designed the costumes, styling them after peasant dress. In exile, Stravinsky laboured long ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”