“... when talent and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good ...”

“... steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to ...”

“... him. In writing of such things, how ever, he shied away from the sexual suggestiveness of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. His innocent eye looked always for the whimsical, the curious, the charming; nothing he wrote in this kind has the creepiness of the best Machen. Whimsicality and conscious charm mark his first ...”

“... and then returned to the cart. Certain words are spoken. At the end, a shiny card is put into a little slot and taken out again, and a folded slip of paper is given to the people by the priest. The people depart into the world outside with their things. The anthropologist has come from another planet or another time, perhaps the time when Zola called the ...”

“... they are: Mr Wise is a dunce, Mr King is a Whig, Mr Coffin’s uncommonly sprightly, And huge Mr Little broke down in a gig While driving fat Mrs Golightly.The lines come to life when they begin to see names less as clues to the characters of their owners – whether faithfully reflected, or just as reliably not – than as temporary restrictions or skins to ...”

“... might mean, and what their advantages might be, these snippets of information can be of little use to the candidate. And nowhere is there the vaguest hint that some boards also allow the study of texts outside the canon which is outlined in the remainder of the book. It is quite possible that the author does not consider these choices to be ...”

“... it stemming from Immanuel Kant – a man who spent his life in a backwater of East Prussia, cared little for the arts, and knew very little about them. His Critique of Judgment says what is, in Carey’s words, ‘patently untrue’, namely that the beautiful may be so called only if the speaker believes that everybody else ...”

“... Aristotle’s conception of poetic truth was one in which correspondence with reality played little part, and his biology gave an account of what he thought ought to be true in the light of his deep conception of the true purposes of nature. Thus it ought to be true according to the hebdomadal rule that male semen is infertile between the ages of seven ...”

“... like that of his creations, is of a gaseous nature. Max Beerbohm once wrote a memorable little sketch of a visit to the Sage of Box Hill, and of hearing Meredith’s voice addressing the air as he approached, and recommencing the conversation as he walked away. In mid-century Meredith dazzled his friends and public, but the bubble eventually ...”

“... stood from the green jungle carpet, browning at the top like cauliflowers. Their trunks curve a little this way and that, giving the appearance of reptilian life.’ So Greene describes it in Congo Journal. It might well have been while running away from these afternoon bores that he imagined the flight of Deo Gratias, Querry’s boy, into the forest at ...”

“... their fathers, must become themselves, for how else will they acquire the authority to teach the little replicas to come? When this part of the message is being advertised, the tone of the novel becomes tediously wise: ‘Everything has to come to an end, Timothy,’ says Clement. ‘But that’s only because other things have to begin. You walk from one ...”

“... Dorset peasantry were ‘exceedingly just and clear-sighted’. In the Twenties Powys was still little known, though that was to change when Mr Weston’s Good Wine won enough esteem to become one of the first sixpenny Penguins. (It even got a perceptible nod of approval from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended ...”

“... and joyous hystorye’, and its presumptive author, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase, ‘little better than a criminal’. Actually, Lewis much understated the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory of Newbold Revel was not ‘...”

“... be attributed to systems of stimulus and response (ring bell, dog salivates), behaviourists had little need for germ plasm, cheerfulness factors or heritability. Perhaps more significant, studies of the biological bases of psychological traits came into stark disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s owing to their prominent place in Nazi eugenics ...”

“... California. It elicited a groan.Harrison was my mentor, or, as he preferred it, I was his ‘little brother’. A gap of 58 years separated our fraternal union. When I was six, he yelled at me for eating my waffle ‘like a barbarian’. When I was eight, he explained to me the concept of nuclear war. When I was fourteen, he got me drunk for the first ...”