“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... the power to decide the meaning of words – the ultimate scoring system. For Hobbes, the king must choose what is good and what is bad, what is war and what is peace, which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Surely, Nguyen suggests, we must be free to decide these things for ourselves? And it’s a short step from Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham, the man behind ...”

“... become the ‘moloch of the species’, as J.H. Kellogg, the American health reformer and cereal king, described it in the typically apocalyptic rhetoric of anti-onanists. Female masturbators, previously sidelined, acquired new prominence, and the prevention of infantile masturbation became a Europe-wide obsession. French doctors performed genital surgery on ...”

“... Brown’s sonorously essential Collected Poems, and the first of his works to be set to music by Peter Maxwell Davies, with whom Brown worked closely in developing the St Magnus arts festival on Orkney. The 14 individually titled couplets of this poem set out, as Fergusson notices, ‘the 14 stations of Christ’s Passion and death reflected in the cycle of ...”

“... damage.Back in London, the Week was reaching its peak of notoriety. Improbably, it joined the king’s camp against the government during the 1936 abdication crisis: Cockburn detested Stanley Baldwin and the establishment even more than the monarchy. By printing what the rest of the world was already reading, the Week became indispensable during the ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston was ...”

“... decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of ...”

“... like this, and the Portuguese got much of what they wanted. Vasco da Gama also gave the kindly king his first experience of being bombarded by a new European device: the cannon. As time passed and Europe’s military technology outstripped that of its rivals, the need and capacity for furia grew obsolete. It belonged to times when European invaders and ...”

“... a visit to the region at the urging of the writer Gregorio Marañón; shocked by the poverty, the king ordered the first road to be built. ‘Work went slowly,’ Baxter writes. ‘Spain seemed almost to prefer Las Hurdes in its primitive state. Marañón, a bullfight aficionado and cultural traditionalist, regarded it as Spain in its purest form, and even ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... series presenting adaptations of Sade’s works by Buñuel, von Stroheim, Pasolini, Guy Debord, Peter Brook and Nagisa Oshima. Meanwhile, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has published its fourth volume of Sade, a lavish 1150-page edition of the great erotic writings: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine. The works span the decade ...”

“... He had trained as a painter – including a spell at the Royal College of Art. He had danced for King George V, and Anna Pavlova had invited him to choreograph a set of Indian dances, which were performed at Covent Garden the year before his father’s ballet was put on there. ‘He is endowed with one of the most perfect bodies I have ever seen in a man in ...”

“... man ‘who began his memoir with the sentence: “In a land of moral imbeciles, I knew I could be king.”’ All the same, the final stretch of Lee’s life was quite sad, and in Riesman’s telling it becomes a kind of goofy parable about the dangers of attaching a single face to collaborative endeavours. There’s a theory that the modern notion of ...”