“... with Sophie, at one time ‘the surest thing between Bridgend and Carmarthen town’, wife of Charles Norris, one of the male group who meet at the Bible, who is a co-owner in the restaurant business with his brother Victor: ‘Absolutely not my cup of tea. He’s ... you know.’ ‘What, you mean ...’ ‘Well, we’re not supposed to mind them these ...”

“... feminists; the public disgrace and political ruin of Parnell and the rising political star Charles Dilke following high-profile divorce cases; and, most sensational of all, the wave of moral rearmament that landed Britain with a regime of censorship, surveillance and repression. In 1885, following Stead’s revelations about child prostitution in ...”

“... was ‘deeply happy – with a completeness and serenity of happiness for which I had never dared hope’. Later she said she had never been physically attracted to Antonio, but this was to a lover, so we can treat it with caution. In June 1925 she bore Antonio a son, whom they named Gianni. She idolised him. On the other hand, she did not spend all that much ...”

“... been many attempts to imagine ways of organising care beyond the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane ...”

“... author Scott-Baumann deals with is Aphra Behn (1640-89). Behn had a short career as a spy for Charles II, was probably imprisoned and was among the first women to make a living from her writing. Behn represents ‘a very important corner on the road’, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. With Behn, ‘we leave behind, shut up in their parks ...”

“... the moral chaos of the modern world has simply been described by philosophers, from what it might hope to be if this chaos had been to any substantial degree generated by their intellectual activities. If the latter were the case, the resuscitation of an unjustly and unwisely abandoned philosophical heritage would in itself be an effective form of social ...”

“... is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward filled that gap. Here was the map ...”

“... he were alive’, of Richard II. In his absence, the Mortimer claim to the monarchy could hope to find a base within Wales. The support of the disaffected Percy family, including Hotspur, generated plans to revamp the entire power structure of Britain – a problematic document known as the Tripartite Indenture appears to unveil the ...”

“... mean School of, Circle of, Follower of, Style of – ‘or nothing much at all’. ‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’ Tony asks. Martin has no doubts at all about this. ‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean.’ And so Martin lays his plans. Help Tony sell the Giordano, offer to take the other paintings off his hands, and ...”

“... too little or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip – ‘When I am dead, I hope it may be said:/”His sins were scarlet but his books were read”’ – prompts the thought that if he had committed any scarlet sins they would have been made public long ago. His elderly infatuation with Lady Juliet Duff, subject of many epigrams, was ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door ...”

“... boy, he and his companions learned to be ‘adept and fantastic liars. Telling lies was their best hope of staying alive, and they lied to everybody, about everything. As Vanags wrote, “I knew that if ever I were caught telling the truth, I’d be sent to the camps.”’ If he’s lying now, he’s a very good liar. And if he’s a very good liar, it’s ...”

“... Russia and China, and it also informed American artists of colour such as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett (a genealogy traced in a superb exhibition curated by Buchloh with Michelle Harewood for the Reina Sofía in 2022). At moments one wonders why Kollwitz was embraced so readily: sometimes her workers appear degraded and her ...”

“... tallest building, Seifert deliberately submitted an ugly low-rise and an elegant high-rise, in the hope that the latter would be selected (as it was). The touchy, serious and wholly establishment architect Denys Lasdun is Calder’s anti-Seifert and his real great love. He writes beautifully about the concrete structure of the National Theatre, of how the ...”

“... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...”