“... In​ 1925, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st earl of Iveagh, purchased Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the house, and artistic holdings, of an 18th-century gentleman ...”

“... the IRA recruited child soldiers. Five months later, in November 1981, Ronnie’s younger brother, Cecil, was visiting his wife and their newborn baby at her parents’ house. She was staying there because the baby was premature and needed constant attention. But Cecil’s wife was a Catholic, and the house she was staying ...”

“... When confronted at the campfire by a vision of Jesus, he hides behind his boss. ‘With Cecil it’s all right; you can do what you like … provided that you don’t get him into trouble.’ Controversy over Cecil Rhodes began long before the recent campaign to remove statues of him from the University of Cape ...”

“... capacity, invite a comparison with a British statesman of an earlier generation, Sir Robert Peel; and they made, as Peel’s career had shown, a dangerous combination. Samuel’s Balliol in the final Jowett years had the same pre-eminence as Peel’s Christ Church. Both took first-class honours (though Samuel’s history First after four years ...”

“... Allott, were revised and reissued in 1979. A new edition is on the way from Nicholas Shrimpton. Cecil Lang is up to the second instalment of the Letters (despite fierce crossfire from rival scholars in the letters pages of the TLS). Following the line opened by Lionel Trilling’s ‘biography of a mind’ in America and by Raymond Williams’s Arnoldian ...”

“... in the narrower sense. By contrast, he had been warned a few years earlier by his cousin, Hugh Cecil, that adopting tariff reform would lead ‘to corruption and ... a general Americanising of our politics’. Here Hugh Cecil gave the term a very wide application. How much political corruption was there in Britain during ...”

“... of the US army, as it advanced across Europe in 1944, were Rolleiflexes. Contemporaries such as Robert Capa would have found that decision insane – almost as insane as joining the advance in the first place, given that Miller was a former fashion model who never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague ...”

“... Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the ...”

“... Robert Wyatt​ is one of the last survivors of the 1960s pop music scene in Britain. He has been recording for nearly half a century. He was said to be reckless and unfocused for most of his life, but he’s also the best sort of slow-burner moving along at his own pace. Having gone for it late in the day, he hung on to his ‘tankie’ party card – Communist Party of Great Britain – beyond the call of duty, but only because he’d steered his very own Centurion into a deep thicket, opened the hatch and taken a lengthy breather before deciding the game was up ...”

“... her public silence to the grave and Diana Souhami is not playing ghost to her shade. Greta and Cecil is not a biography of either Garbo or Beaton, but an account of their bizarre relationship, which, at its best, manages, improbably, to turn even the ineffably shallow Cecil Beaton into something of an enigma. We are ...”

“... better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert Dallek scooped him with ...”

“... Schaap said, ‘I have the feeling of the conclusion of the age of the prophets.’The pianist Cecil Taylor performed an elegy of shimmering delicacy,1 punctuated by hints of an impending storm. Ravi Coltrane, John Coltrane’s son, gave a stately reading on soprano saxophone of Coleman’s 1959 composition ‘Peace’, with Geri Allen on piano. The tenor ...”

“... reputation of the house. H.D. played the tree of life, Frieda Lawrence the serpent and D.H. God; Cecil Gray (about to become H.D.’s lover) was ‘the angel at the gate’. Aldington and H.D. had liked to imagine that their marriage resembled that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it’s rare for two poets to ...”

“... remove this prime minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of 1968 came when Cecil Harmsworth King, a hereditary owner of newspapers, invited Earl Mountbatten to seize the governance of Britain. Had the Earl been corruptible, or mad, we might have had a coup d’état of Latin American proportions. The essence of National Socialism is to ...”

“... feel to the place: in his autobiography, An Unfinished Odyssey (1984), Albert Hourani’s brother, Cecil, recalls how ‘we ate the food of the Lebanese villages – kibbé and the traditional dish of Saturday, mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous ...”