“... around his waist. ‘Like Dylan or Bowie,’ O’Toole remarks, ‘he was one of the great masters of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist.’ In fact, Shaw and Bob Dylan are the only two people to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. Like Wilde, he was his own most precious creation. Churchill called him ‘the greatest living ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... a poem about the best room in the house, reserved for deaths and Christmas, by alluding to two masters: ‘My mind moves upon silence and Aeneid VI.’ In Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ mastery is possible – Caesar, Helen of Troy, Michelangelo – because the mind can accept its conditions by sequestering itself within them: Like a long-legged fly upon ...”

“... it. What else can it engender except hate? One day the blacks will find a way to end it Their masters will not spot until too late. Meanwhile the sole good reason to defend it Somebody should be brave enough to state: With all of the appropriate delights Top-level cricket is reserved for whites. You must be white to wear the proper cap And have a ...”

“... Colm Tóibín is too costive with words, Barry is too spendthrift. In contemporary Irish fiction, John Banville strikes just the right balance between opulence and discipline. Even so, Barry’s verbal extravagance makes for an intriguing, typically Irish tension between bleakness of content and richness of form, a contrast equally notable in Synge, Joyce and ...”

“... to promise a high-class thriller, though the 1970s setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and ...”

“... standard study The Rise of the Novel (1957), while the title of A.D. McKillop’s The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956) speaks for itself. It was not until the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that Haywood’s importance was established, and even then Pope’s stereotype survived, though recast in approving tones. All the ...”

“... from the classical intellectual is in his lack of a vigorous public presence. George Eliot and John Stuart Mill moved in what could still be called a public sphere, which is less true of their modern counterparts. It was true, however, of the public seminars of the Parisian masters in the 1960s and 1970s, which were ...”

“... to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is compelled to return, parodically, obsessively, to ...”

“... as if it were an abracadabra. Only give us the wand, the hungry hotshots cry, and we’ll be masters of the universe. At one point the super-suits are even prepared to sit manipulating the ends of a metre of rope to learn from a French funambulist how to make a clove hitch knot that unties, if you do it right, as if by magic. They’ve paid their ...”

“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... phrase – as an ‘emblem of empire to come’. Roe was, however, the diplomatic servant of two masters: he was James’s representative, but received his annual salary of £600 from the EIC, which barred him from involvement in commercial matters. The demand for his appointment had come from company factors in India such as William Biddulph, who in 1613 ...”

“... absence of large voices, capable of negotiating the technical demands of the later 19th-century masters, not least that of meeting the resistance of a full symphony orchestra with vocal equanimity. Large does not only mean loud: it’s easy enough to sing loud, and plenty can and do. It also implies gravitas, stamina, and an organ-like ability to colour and ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”