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“... seas was Poussin’s great mind voyaging? No one really had much idea until the publication of Anthony Blunt’s monograph in 1967, which argued that Poussin ‘thought in terms of Stoicism’, set forth ‘his views on ethics ... with clarity and vigour in his letters’, and ‘applied his philosophy to the practical conduct of his life in the most exact ...”

“... ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in the pillory served. Let’s get the blanket over ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”

“... Union. It’s instructive to compare the account Moore gives of this fiasco to the one provided by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe in The Blunders of Our Governments, their litany of the cock-ups of the modern British state. Even in this exalted company – the Millennium Dome, the ERM disaster – the poll tax takes pride of place, ‘the blunder to end all ...”

“... in Glenkiln. The sculpture by Moore which is most eloquent in this context is the bronze seated King and Queen of 1952-3. McEwen quotes Moore saying that the subject owed something to the bedtime stories he read to his daughter. Their majesties look like survivors of a distant age, an effect enhanced by the fact that they recall the lean, tense warriors of ...”

“... radio broadcast: ‘You must believe me … found it impossible … to discharge my duties as king … without the help and support of the woman I love.’ The woman he loved, the American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson, is more vividly drawn, an art deco clothes horse in Chanel and Cartier, standing beside him through the long years of what became, in ...”

“... or put in a memo that can be read in the National Archives.Thirty years ago, the reporter Anthony Summers was able to find a woman who said that she once saw Hoover in a hotel suite ‘wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig’ – but she was paid for the story, and in another ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the ...”

“... is fascinated with the loss his endeavours would seem to oppose. ‘There are few persons,’ Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ Aubrey, born in Wiltshire, attended Trinity College, Oxford in the 1640s, but his studies were interrupted by the ...”

“... aunt, he Lady Diana’s publisher. On the maternal side, Sybil Cooper was descended directly from King William IV through his mistress Mrs Jordan, in her day a celebrated actress. It is not, I think, altogether illusory to see, in this infusion of blood, cause for Hart-Davis’s own inclination towards the stage and traces of the Sailor ...”

“... Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by Anthony Nutting: ‘he had for too long been the Golden Boy of the Tory Party, the glamorous Crown Prince awaiting the summons to mount the throne in place of the ageing Emperor ...”

“... this demonic creature. But Bowker had not reckoned with the resourcefulness of a local clergyman, Anthony Anderson, who handled the matter on behalf of the church courts. By the time he became involved the monster had been cut open by the local innkeeper in the presence of the curate, and bacon and bits of straw found in its stomach; moreover, a local cat had ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... ecstasy. I hope to hear much more of it. At first it seems improbable that The Venetian Vespers by Anthony Hecht should be able to sustain the weight of its three epigraphs: one from King Lear, one from Moby Dick and one by Beethoven. And indeed, Hecht’s shorter poems, chatty and clever, with their immense vocabulary and ...”

“... smaller in stature’. Now I come to think of it, though, that might interest an alien. Francis King, in his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly, writes as straightforwardly as he has always done. Every so often in the course of his long career as a novelist critics have spoken of the detachment of his style, nearly all of them meaning it as a ...”