“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given ...”

“... and distinctive achievement. Pinget has been reasonably well served by his English publisher, John Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have ...”

“... I represent things as I see them,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar ...”

“... to it. I am paranoid about the word ‘paranoia’, and the previous researches of, above all, Sir Aubrey Lewis have helped me indulge my fear. Lewis’s famous paper, ‘Paranoia and Paranoid: A Historical Perspective’, provides a framework around which some further historical speculations can be built. ‘Paranoia’ is a simple word which has nonetheless ...”

“... naval officer as the women appear for strictly utilitarian purposes’. In the novel, Jack Aubrey, an open-hearted Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of ...”

“... with its ritual manifestation and destruction of the sins of the flesh, into a Lenten moment, like Aubrey Beardsley’s deathbed, for the burning of dirty pictures; his campaign against sodomy, properly though a little timidly construed by Martines as anal intercourse with persons of either sex; the grand anticlimax of his sensible but unpopular cancellation ...”

“... which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the service after a conviction for rigging the Stock Market – a crime of which he was innocent. He is set up as master of a private man-of-war by his newly rich friend, Maturin, a Naval physician who also serves the Admiralty as a secret ...”

“... knowledge and is undisturbed by popular feeling’. The real victim, besides Wilde himself, was Aubrey Beardsley, who craved a popular audience and the celebrity that went with it. Yeats first met Beardsley at the launch party for the Savoy, the magazine founded by Arthur Symons and Beardsley after Beardsley had been fired as art editor of the Yellow Book ...”

“... tumult of weeping. W.C. Fields would be proud of her. Patrick O’Brian’s 13th story about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin – appropriately called The Thirteen-Gun Salute – is as entertaining as its predecessors. O’Brian is a master of the narrative of action, but he has sustained interest through this long sequence of novels by expanding the genre to ...”

“... a most ungodly face, like a rotten russet apple when ’tis bruised’. You can confirm that, as Aubrey noted, he had one eye bigger and lower than the other. And you can guess at what was by then his vast bulk. In his youth he was tall and rangy, a ‘hollow-cheekt scrag’, but by middle age he had swelled to a corpulent 19 stone. In his poem ‘My Picture ...”

“... of Lord Clark as a young boy’ by Charles Sims (c.1911). ‘The Black Cape’ by Aubrey Beardsley (1894). ‘The Back of the Chair’ by Cézanne (c.1879). ‘The Young Paul Asleep’ by Cézanne (c.1878). Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ (1881-82) and Cézanne’s ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ (c.1887). The Warburg Institute. Clark ...”

“... of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next ...”

“... the subject as the campanile that reaches up into it, and Burne-Jones’s The Merciful Knight. John Frederick Lewis, who spent ten years in Cairo amassing drawings of Oriental life, came home and turned them into images like Hhareem Life, Constantinople, in which the detail is abundant and accurate but the atmosphere suburban English. In the end he gave up ...”

“... Ian McIntyre’s controllership, largely thanks to the bullish Managing Director of BBC Radio, Aubrey Singer, who insisted that the tasteful drive-time sequence of Homeward Bound be rejigged as Mainly for Pleasure in the search for larger audiences. The Director-General, Alasdair Milne, wondered if Radio 3’s style of presentation wasn’t ‘too stodgy ...”

“... at the most straightforward level of weighing and measuring. It was an indication of the antiquary John Aubrey’s remarkably curious mind that he wanted to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his ...”