“... years succeeded each other with placid similitude. He lived the life of a privileged country gentleman, unostentatious, comparatively retired, almost obscure.’ Nicolson’s loyal and royal life was thus more a triumph of will than of empathy, of tact rather than tolerance. And although it was received with great acclaim as the first word on the ...”

“... obscures his loin cloth-covered penis, as if remarking on the artist’s virility. The artist as gentleman, the artist as courtier, the artist as thinker, the artist as a young man or woman, the artist as artist and handsome figure: these are some of the varieties of representation of the artist from the Reformation and Renaissance to, say, ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... never letting anybody else get a word in’. Worthy of F.E. Smith’s gibe that he was the sort of gentleman who always played the game and always lost it, Austen waited for his adversary to depart before having ‘his revenge – pouring out an incessant flow of reminiscence which might be amusing were it crisp and to the point but every sentence is expanded ...”

“... conception of Shylock as a symbol of a persecuted race, a Jewish merchant in some ways more of a gentleman than anyone else in the play’. Although Irving’s butchery of Shakespeare’s texts is reprehensible, it’s not unknown today: Peter Brook is not the only contemporary director to follow Irving in cutting Fortinbras from Hamlet. And his critique of ...”

“... the outside. Carra was a less déraciné exponent than Morandi, but his productions, The Drunken Gentleman apart, still seem contrived: he was an honourable artist, a trier, but his creative work was done in his Futurist period. Wyndham Lewis’s preposterous ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period’ is the sort of ...”

“... groups, one of these was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking gentleman called Sir John Lawrence proposed that we begin from the assumption that the decline of the Soviet economic system had passed the point of no-return. Any policy recommendations must therefore reckon with the consequences of its collapse within the next ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... here he is noble Pompée, Corneille’s tragic hero, there Sganarelle or Arnolphe or the Would-Be Gentleman, his face hidden behind the looped moustachios and chin-tuft which he borrowed from Scaramouche, the Italian farceur, Fiorilli. Though there are enough portraits to indicate that, as a young man, he was handsome, other evidence suggests that he was ...”

“... the upper orders. In England, she tells us, coursing is part of the world of the English country gentleman, who is rarely a gambling man, because gambling, however foolish it may be, has a point to it, and the English country gentleman prefers to do things that have no point. The English race as a whole loves the ...”

“... he set himself to shed his American identity and acquire the appearance and accent of an English gentleman. Here his efforts were largely successful – perhaps to a fault. One friend contended that Ned spoke ‘perfect, too perfect English’. At Oxford his admiration for all things male intensified. He was happy to inhabit a world from which women were ...”

“... Howard and the many others whose shocking stories are told in The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman, the journalist whose investigations led to the uncovering of the scandal, came in on their parents’ British passports: from the moment of emancipation in 1834, freed men and women became British subjects. But long before the raft of legislation in ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... to be tolerated. W.G. may often have behaved more like a Player, but he had come into the world a Gentleman, and as if to show there should be no confusing him with the Players, he made a point of doing especially well against them in the annual series of matches that were played between the two. When, in 1898, the year in which he turned 50, a jubilee match ...”

“... the mood took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular virtue’ – the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ...”