“... back, if only as chat fodder in the salons. In 1940, their libel case was for several months, says Philip Ziegler, ‘the chief pleasure of literary London’. Most sensible people believed that the lawsuit should never have been brought. Desmond MacCarthy, asked to appear as a pro-Sitwell witness, responded with a telegram: ‘Even fools have right to say ...”

“... wit and hidden political mischief, C.S. Lewis when his eye was on the story. And then there was Philip Pullman – whom I met first in his delightful retelling of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (1993), and then in the cosmically ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). I am no doubt unusually central to the target zone of fiction that pours Milton ...”

“... Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking metal, as in Ovid:Where are the ...”

“... of Kennedy and his advisers, published for the first time in The Kennedy Tapes. Ernest May and Philip Zelikow have convincingly placed the White House deliberations within the political and military context of the missile crisis itself. To this they have added a brilliant account of the shared assumptions which Kennedy and his advisers brought to their ...”

“... Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth. The only ...”

“... it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban disco. How come? The exterior of the building was designed by one architect, the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper is capable of saying anything, if she thinks you are dumb enough to swallow it. Philip Ziegler has reason to consider himself astute, but he perhaps ruled out too soon the possibility that the queen of the put-on had spotted the ideal patsy. The chief lacuna in an otherwise interesting book is its failure adequately to convey the heroine’s ...”

“... on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk ...”

“... sad day for me because there is always the possibility that I shall not be invited to Derby House ball, the grandest collection of people in the world. This year I have not [been]: I am inclined to believe that it is a mistake.’Fancy dress parties became wildly popular in the 1920s. No one enjoyed them more than George V’s eldest son, the future Edward ...”

“... on unlikely coincidences, with a 16th-century Italian head of John the Baptist sitting next to Philip Guston’s 1976 Hat, its black backdrop superimposed with white lines – like chalk on blackboard. There were works by Chardin, Zurbarán, Sickert. She seems to like things in pairs: a pair of owls, a pair of plastic trays, a pair of hares, her own film ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... novella The Subterraneans than to the disciplined delivery of the Six Gallery poets: McClure, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. The change in the status of the performers after that night, the way the luckiest of them became marketable brands, spokesmen for ecology, wilderness politics and ...”

“... age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist,’ Philip Ball noted in the Observer. ‘In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of ...”

“... thereby bringing individual meaning to the experience? Or would he have deliberately ballooned the ball over the crossbar, thereby defining himself through negative action? And what would he have made of that old Romantic bourgeois Hamish McAlpine, the Dundee United keeper who used to take all of his side’s penalties whenever one was awarded during regular ...”

“... the imagination of the ‘counterculture’. Norman Mailer, who dismissed psychoanalysts as ‘ball shrinkers’, promoted him in the Village Voice (‘intellectuals,’ he told Turner, ‘never had good orgasms’). For Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs he was the only analyst worth taking seriously (Burroughs used his orgone box for most of his adult ...”