“... reading (Browning, Chesterton, Poe) and details appointments with the people he needed to know: Arthur Waley at the British Museum, a guide in his versions of Chinese and Persian poetry; Akhmatova’s friend Boris Anrep, who made the mosaic on the floor of the National Gallery; C.R.W. Nevinson, the painter whom everyone needed to know; and Ottoline Morrell ...”

“... it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with Spenser, William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, and several popular novels set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was ...”

“... and continues, ‘this assertion … was only too open to arithmetical correction, and one Arthur T. Froggatt, in a letter to the Musical Times a few months later, attempted a more accurate count: “In the 31 published trios there are 744 bars in which the cello part differs from the pianoforte bass – an average of 24 bars to a trio.”’ But ...”

“... technical. He rightly saw – he discovered in practice – that his art would amount to precious little if he couldn’t find ways to keep the specifically English forms of landscape mooning alive in his colour and space. One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti ...”

“... amounts of strong emotion are ascribed to historical actors about whose feelings we can know very little. The handful of details that survive about Henry VIII’s childhood are spun into assertions about his longing for his dead mother; apparently his first marriage took place in her oratory because he ‘still needed to feel her presence’. His encounter ...”

“... to the more deft and ‘flexible’ Harold Wilson, who, it seems, had tired of being ‘Nye’s little dog’. (Bevan had left the Shadow Cabinet on principle over British support for the growing war in Indo-China. Is there a premonition, here, of Wilson’s later attack on backbench rebels against his own pro-LBJ regime, warning them that every dog was ...”

“... writes, to the ‘myths and fabrications which have been popularised by courtiers and toadies like Arthur Schlesinger’, whom he refers to as ‘a sycophant’. He is similarly tough with Stanley Hoffman for being too respectful of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens is at his best when on the attack. He can’t stand Cyril Connolly, whom he sees as a precious old ...”

“... This is the familiar gobbledygook by which bureaucrats through the ages have puffed up their little initiatives (what does Paragraph 59 mean, other than ‘we may be a bit more flexible about who we take, but don’t bet on it’?). Elsewhere, the language has a more sinister tinge. In the ‘Statement of Purpose’ it is declared that ‘our function is ...”

“... extend and perhaps challenge the work of a Winckelmann, a Darwin or a Burckhardt. There would be little point in defending them as places where the rare or obscure can be rediscovered in private and where anyone, however poor, can speculate and meditate in peace. They have to present themselves as exciting places to shop, with didactic but fun videos, and ...”

“... causes which lead to the advance of morality’, concluded that ‘natural selection effects but little’ and looked instead to such things as ‘the approbation of our fellow-men’ and ‘example and imitation’. Much later, when the mechanism of natural selection had come to be understood in greater depth and detail than had been possible for Darwin ...”

“... he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the ...”

“... mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and frustration fanned the wranglings that went on between them and the national leadership. Meanwhile the England fit for heroes to live in remained an ignis fatuus. After 1945 there was substantial change: a ...”

“... been soft on the subject of death: ‘one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’ is the best-known of literary criticisms. In fact, succeeding generations, while following Wilde’s sneering direction, have generally misread or skipped the protracted death-scenes that multiply in Victorian fiction. If they do not amuse or ...”

“... rivalries were disingenuous. They were amateurs, to be sure, but neurotically-driven amateurs with little love for one another, and scarcely more lovable to us than their contemporary, the unspeakable Sir Thomas Phillipps, the monomaniac who ruthlessly amassed and guarded what was reputed to be the hugest collection of manuscripts ever owned by a private ...”

“... might David Selznick have made better movies? Ronald Haver asks no such question. He spends as little time exploring Selznick’s feelings as he does evaluating his films or examining why Gone with the Wind wowed Middle America. When he does refer to anyone’s private life, he adopts gossip-writers’ phrases like ‘romantically involved’. And although ...”