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“... than television. The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but ...”

“... introductory survey of Parliament (not only the Commons) between 1386 and 1421, and Linda Clark’s illuminating statistical appendices, this volume breaks new ground in providing a remarkably informative series of 135 substantial ‘constituency surveys’. Based on independent and original research, these range from Helston in Cornwall to Hythe in ...”

“... prose, his idea of freedom ceases to be urbane and becomes temporarily romantic and Wordsworthian. Peter Ackroyd is aware of Wilde’s relation to the Young Ireland movement, and in his fictional account of Wilde’s last months in Paris he makes a courageous attempt to align his subject with the Irish libertarian tradition. Wilde’s enemies ‘mocked me also ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”

“... men expecting to find evidence of it? No, indeed not. Listening for a second time to Sir Kenneth Clark’s splendid series of television broadcasts on ‘Civilisation’, I was again struck by the importance that Clark attached to confidence as a bonding agent in the advance of civilisation, as it is indeed throughout ...”

“... testimony, power seldom looks alluring. The distended egos of New Labour grandees such as Peter Mandelson, and especially Prescott, float by from time to time, gas-filled blimps at risk of collision or spontaneous combustion. Mandy, prickly, imperious and unloved, falls, twice. Gordon Brown schemes to become leader, while his faction intrigues against ...”

“... Ironically, working on a monumental scale involved a loss. In his short, ardent, posthumous book Peter Fuller concedes that there was some unevenness in Moore’s sculpture, but he has no time for the ‘waves of intellectuals’ who have expressed serious reservations in recent decades. Moore is presented as an embodiment of ancient sagacity, a lonely ...”

“... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel ...”

“... the troubled career of the poet laureate, Dryden. In The Enemy’s Country, based on the 1986 Clark Lectures, Hill considers a number of 17th-century writers, including Dryden, Donne, Henry Wotton, Izaac Walton and Hobbes, together with Ezra Pound. The essays focus with characteristic acuity on nuances of style and tone, but Hill is concerned throughout ...”

“... Menuhin had approached Benjamin Britten, but he rejected the idea as unworkable. Eventually Peter Feuchtwanger was chosen – he had an interest in Indian and Arabic music – but the project was doomed from the start. Menuhin had promised Shankar that the score would be a ‘useful point de départ’, but it ended up swamping the musicians with ...”

“... detail plain.4 March. I am rereading (or reading properly) James Stourton’s book on Kenneth Clark. I hadn’t realised how apposite for these days is Yeats’s quite hackneyed ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ … The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”

“... This summer​ , a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross ...”

“... and the younger generations of militant conservative empiricists’ from Namier through to J.C.D. Clark. Thirdly, he rebuts the charge that Trevelyan’s obsession with the English countryside was mere passive élitist escapism: on the contrary, it was translated into highly effective public work on behalf of the National Trust and the conservation movement ...”

“... got it right when they had Judy Garland playing a star-struck teenager gazing at a pin-up of Clark Gable and singing ‘If you were the only boy in the world’. It’s if, not when. Mix them up and you remember the story of Gable resting on set minus his false teeth shouting gummily at another passing icon: ‘Look here, Marilyn, America’s ...”