“... a year. He had resigned the Chancellorship immediately after the Submission of the Clergy on 15 May 1532. At the beginning of 1533, he was obliged to defend his Church from another assault, constitutional this time, but again anonymous, sponsored by Thomas Cromwell. The antagonist was an eminent and now elderly lawyer, one Christopher St German, and he was ...”

“... in living standards – ‘Now there appears to be but one order of people, a middle Class as they may be called’ (Tuesday, 14 September) – while deploring the general lack of decorum. Madame Récamier comes in for censure on the low cut of her dress. There are also revealing accounts of major artistic and political personalities, including a description ...”

“... I went to live in America. He was 76; I was 23. I was unmarried; he had just married again. This may be significant. I said goodbye, and he enclosed my forearm with a huge hand of undiminished grip. Without looking at me, he said: ‘Wenn der Putz steht, liegt der Seichel indrehd!’ In other words, which you may possibly ...”

“... ingenious compromises, and indeed a challenge like this, amounting in effect to the pang of guilt, may sometimes be useful to a creative artist. How many composers have been teased into action by the desire to assimilate, to allay the taunting demon of, John Cage? Cage has been catalysing like mad for over thirty years, but his unusual career, from enfant to ...”

“... provides arrows pointing into pans apparently to show the way in. However, it is an art-form which may well delight all those emancipated readers who save their nail clippings to put on the compost heap. ‘Food from the hedgerows seems a pretty Arcadian idea,’ says Jane Grigson in her Vegetable Book. ‘It has even supported a best-seller or two.’ Though ...”

“... sexual gratification than he used to. This is a seasonally intended book and Crisp’s memoirs may well be sequelised from now to Xmas 2000. An ingenuous youth – Bert – is also the hero of Nicholas Mosely’s Imago Bird. Mosley also employs the monologue-journal form of narration and this work is a sequel. Hereafter, all resemblance ceases. Imago Bird ...”

“... what used to be called a gentleman, though as his father had been in trade (bacon), his standing may have been precarious. But he was educated. Oh dear, yes, he was educated. He says himself that when living as a fisherman he simply dropped his accomplishments, yet when he is writing – and not about literary matters but about fishing – he cannot keep ...”

“... was intentionally such that very few records of essential decisions were kept; David Irving may even be formally right in his assertion that there is no written document to link Hitler himself with the Final Solution until October 1943; and the same absence or confusion in the written record has even been taken as evidence that the whole thing did not ...”

“... they saw much that was good in the “old ways”.’ She does mention the effect of what may be called the beginnings of press criticism and the growing influence of the Nonconformists, who were effectively if not legally barred from attendance at Oxford and Cambridge, the attraction of Bible criticism and the paramount importance of the earth ...”

“... A hundred or so pages further on, she suggests that Beardsley’s ‘iridescent interests’ may have ‘enlarged his stature’. What’s more, she describes A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897) as a monument to the 24-year-old Beardsley’s ‘iridescence and growth’. She could scarcely have found a more inept word to harp on in a biography of an artist ...”

“... Chardin, Fragonard and David, although they are surely artists of equal stature: and much the same may be said of many other periods. Sculpture loses more in electric light and in photographic reproduction than paintings do, but long before these inventions it was observed that a real taste for it was less ‘diffused among the mass of mankind’ than a taste ...”

“... I’ve heard of this happening to a victim more than twenty times. Outside the courtroom, victims may face intimidation from the perpetrator or his family. Once on the stand, they will be cross-examined and can be asked questions about whether they have ever engaged in rough sex or flirted with the accused. The defence ...”

“... nowhow I save it from sorrow.If we are reading the play rather than watching a performance, we may have been confused a little earlier, when the ‘scene’ is said to be ‘Troy and Los Angeles’. But then we are often in two places (or more) in the theatre, and there is no reason why one of them shouldn’t be imagined or mythical. Saving a tragedy from ...”

“... appear in Oppenheimer. Or does he? The muddle of the film leaves a little room for doubt. He may be one of the entourage in a scene or two, without lines or a credit. But there is a larger omission in the movie. An essay in the New York Times in January reminded us that the Manhattan Project was a $2 billion adventure hidden from Congress. The Bomb was ...”

“... about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere far too generous with detail, which may explain why none of Dunthorne’s family had actually read the memoir. Four hundred pages in, Dunthorne still hasn’t reached his grandmother’s birth, only her conception. At the time, Siegfried was working for Auer, a company that made lighting ...”