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“... and Sacheverell, their ill-suited and erratic parents and their life at the family home, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, have long since been lodged, along with the Mitfords and some outlying members of the Bloomsbury group, in the national Pantheon of the higher eccentricity. These are people who, it is felt, with some pride, could only be English and about ...”

“... arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of ...”

“... alongside Trafalgar and Waterloo’, Sandbrook points out (correctly) that tens of millions had no interest in football and failed to watch the game. Still, the 1966 final remains the most watched programme in British television history (Princess Diana’s funeral comes second), and if England’s victory was not an overwhelming national event, it’s hard ...”

“... the road with the psychologist J.C. Flügel and the philosopher Cyril Joad, and reported back to John O’ London’s Weekly. His Leaves from a Psychist’s Casebook (1933) and Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) were bestsellers. The BBC frequently broadcast about the supernatural while cultural conservatives also cashed in. In a Britain carved up by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... to have been framed to mitigate or forestall the destructive impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also ...”

“... be said that the volumes under review offer much aid to understanding what was happening inside John Lennon’s mind. Of those people who should not attempt to write biographies of Lennon, Ray Coleman heads the list. A trade editor who might as well have been writing about agricultural machinery as music, he embodies everything Lennon had to fight: social ...”

“... by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after ...”

“... 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York’s bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth ...”

“... be, Mama can’t be your wife [sic] for she is the wife of your papa, and then papa would have no wife.” “But we could both do it to her!” ’ The heart, or hearts, of many-breasted Cybele would warm to that. (I wonder if Melanie Klein believed women became unhinged in the seventh month of pregnancy.) I understand perfectly well that Sophocles’s ...”

“... of desexing it. ‘The Victorian fairyland is a place that not only never existed but also served no imaginative function except that of diversion, of the prim titillation of a jaded fancy.’ So says a character in Angela Carter’s radio play ‘Come unto these yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... fact, as Vergo documents, Whistler didn’t know anything about classical music, preferring music hall songs, and it wasn’t his idea to call the paintings Nocturnes, but that of his patron Frederick Leyland. Another of his works, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), had its musical appellation added ...”

“... project at Poundbury outside Dorchester is the prime British example. In argument, Krier takes no prisoners, and apparently accepts no compromises. He certainly has no fear of unfashionable causes. He has written at length about his architectural hero, Albert Speer, whom he continues ...”