“... from familiar intellectual rations, and we can hear the sceptical, more or less kindly quotation marks slipping into place around the words ‘common wisdom’, or at least around the word ‘wisdom’. Kermode never wrote anything the main army couldn’t understand; but nor did he write anything the main army could have managed on its own. The discreet ...”

“... architects of his time. His work as an architect has been admirably studied in a book by Deborah Howard (also published by Yale and still in print) and it is only touched on by Boucher. His most successful buildings are among the best known in the world – the Mint, the Library and the Loggetta around St Mark’s. They have a plasticity, a richness of ...”

“... as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a curious turning point in the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Up to this point the Tories were remarkable for their defiance of the laws of electoral gravity. Surely, it was assumed, the coming of mass democracy must mean the inevitable defeat of the ...”

“... be the promised reward of our reading. It is the no less imaginary ‘quincunx’ of trees which marks the site of the treasure: in other words, the structure of freely circulating symbols which both creates the fictional lure and negates its reality. As Durrell well understands, paranoia is the indispensable aid of the writer of fiction. We would not strive ...”

“... of Hall’s thesis into his own, together with some further speculations on the subject by Howard Feinstein in his Becoming William James (1984). Edel has always read James’s early story, ‘A Light Man’ (1869), as a record of fraternal rivalry, but now it is also said to bring us ‘into the deeper realm of the homo-erotic feeling that Henry must ...”

“... his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James Mason (Van Damme), who assumes Grant is one George Kaplan. After the bourbon and the car, Grant returns to the scene of the crime with the ...”

“... originate with him but had been a staple of Broadway folderol since the brothers Willie and Eugene Howard imported it from vaudeville into a series of George White’s Scandals, one of the most popular American revues of the 1920s and 1930s.In recounting the way the TV shows were put together, Margolick is clear, sometimes even vivid. But he’s confused about ...”

“... 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He ...”

“... Pantheon, with its huge rotunda. Opened in 1772, it survived until 1937, when the site was sold to Marks and Spencer’s. It was conceived as winter assembly rooms, an indoor equivalent of the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and the neoclassical design by James Wyatt was thought by Gibbon to be ‘the wonder of the 18th century and the British ...”

“... of the English state. Both rest their weight on an individual whose life story is full of question marks. There is no tidy box of historical explanation into which we can put him. The brisk judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper was that Cromwell ‘was a freak in English history’. It has always been easier to fall back on broad-brush assertions or to dismiss him ...”

“... stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ‘affair’ but of the ...”

“... of court, among many other political reverses. The current incumbent at the Home Office, Michael Howard, has been able to rely on the example set by his tenacious predecessor when resisting calls for his resignation after similar tumultuous events. There is at least a kind of naked honesty about such determined ambition. In the early Conservative era, the ...”

“... about its lack. Though literary uncle and nephew remained devoted to one another, Boule de Suif marks a moment of separation. Maupassant had submitted his early attempts at writing to Flaubert, who had responded with detailed advice. He was especially harsh on Maupassant’s verse, just as he had been on Louise Colet’s (this despite – or because of ...”

“... a more guarded sentence. A similar abrupt confidence (which reminds me of Dame Helen Gardner) marks her observation that Miranda’s strangely violent language to Caliban in The Tempest has nothing to do with sexual repression on the island but is, in fact, detached from the character of Miranda, mere impersonal poetic affirmation of the theme of ...”

“... in Mackayesque bids for topicality, though it’s worth remarking how oddly off the point both Howard Davies’s production at the National Theatre and Gale Edwards’s at the English National Opera looked.) By 1820 even the committed Protestant and North Briton Walter Scott had to recognise, in The Abbot, this guilty but irresistible heroine as a member ...”