“... rally. There are silences – the prophylactic silences of things ‘better not said’ which ward off anger and offer no hostages to embarrassment; the silences of children who have feelings, but no words to express them; and there is the near-catatonic silence of those who have words but are governed by a code of laconic understatement which precludes ...”

“... pack Radio City – his real heyday was twenty years back. When he appeared in the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman series on television in 1966 it was as a myth rather than a contemporary. He died in 1987. In the movie the performances keep pace with the glitter and the hokum for a while. Michael Douglas as Liberace acts up onstage and off, twinkles with a coy ...”

“... exposure and dedicated attention, I can improve my responses. Perhaps, through practice, I can ward off the demons of mutism. Again, my own experience bears this out: when I was younger I found it difficult to discover much of interest in some forms or works, whereas now I can breeze into a show of abstract painting, say, and find much to comment on. It ...”

“... She reveals most about her own shortcomings when she reflects on other people’s. Thinking about Peter Friedl’s presentation of a stuffed giraffe at the 2007 Documenta show in Kassel, for instance, she registers a worry about her own inability to execute a living likeness: Works about Zoos, I test myself: ...”

“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”

“... Four, but for the closely related cases of the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward? What did it mean for the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the ...”

“... Faculty of Medicine, in which the patients are not the halt and the lame of the hospital ward but souls in torment, and from that to the unvarnished sexuality of Schiele’s couplings is to come face to face with a unity of time and place. The same unity links the architectural puritanism of Adolf Loos (‘no eyebrows,’ the Emperor complained of ...”

“... has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another,’ wrote Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer; ‘never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.’Cecil was a stinker by all accounts, including the admiring ones. Ada begins The Chestertons with the story of her first meeting with the brothers at a ...”

“... help, counsel and advise his patients. Now the American consumer appears to have rumbled what Sir Peter Medawar has termed the most stupendous confidence-trick of the 20th century. To be sure, the numbers of mentally sick and worried well have not diminished. They are still in search of help, but they are turning more and more to drugs, to ...”

“... she could handle me. It’s true that she thought I would be going away to boarding school, like Peter. So there would only be the holidays, during which, anyway, she gave up on work to accommodate Peter’s presence. I think she really felt that she could cope with anything, anyone difficult because she wrote about such ...”

“... At the Cliveden swimming-pool Jack met, not for the first time, Astor’s osteopath, Stephen Ward, ‘the Doctor’ of the quadrilateral, and the exceptionally pretty Christine Keeler. Profumo, as he later put it, ‘was extremely taken by Christine, whom I thought was Ward’s girlfriend, but he did not seem to be ...”

“... J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the only paper he could find.’ Adamson, who was tasked with introducing art therapy to the hospital, brought Beegan to his studio and gave him an ...”

“... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the ...”

“... at Munich University; the following year he served briefly as an orderly, first in an amputation ward, then in a ward for sexually transmitted diseases, which provided material for the scurrilous work that was becoming his trademark. He knew which side he was on during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war ...”

“... helmets, is plain wrong), but there is also an established scholarly agenda, well exposed by Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005). Briefly, after World War Two the Edward Gibbon view of late antique history – Latin civilisation destroyed by Germanic barbarians – became thoroughly unwelcome in the new Europe, as too ...”