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“... book demands that one remember many names.) The drawings, kept in a cupboard in Windsor Castle, were among ‘hundreds of the finest natural historical drawings’ he had ever seen. Most of the Windsor drawings come from the thousands acquired by Cassiano – patron of Poussin, antiquarian and natural philosopher. Among them were those he had ...”

“... on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his one-time prep school, St Cyprian’s. There he had met George Orwell and Cecil Beaton, and the three began to develop their ...”

“... self-deluding) bastard Art Pepper must have been. And what’s up with you, Terry Castle, that you claim to like this guy? I admit it: it is strange. And I probably can’t keep wriggling out of it by joking about it being a sex thing. Towards the end of Straight Life there’s a long and absorbing interview with one of Pepper’s old Synanon ...”

“... and engaging but ramshackle novel (comparable, according to its author, to a ruined fortress or castle) is in three parts. First we see the period of native rebellion which followed Napoleon’s attempt to bring Haiti into the French Empire. The cayman, a fearsome adjunct to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s guerrilla army, swallows and then generously ...”

“... One article began: ‘Some say you can judge a man by the way he furnishes his home.’ Barbara Ehrenreich thought the pin-ups were a cover for a style-conscious interest in the domestic interior: ‘The breasts and bottoms were necessary not just to sell the magazine but to protect it.’ In the ‘Playboy Penthouse’, every item of furniture and ...”

“... fair at Worcester in 1644, for example, she treated four maids to a shilling each, and even gave Barbara the dairy maid a second shilling when she lost the first. Like their mistress, the girls would have been able to toss a penny to the man with the monkey, or the one with the dancing horse. Living in the country, Jeffreys had relatively few opportunities ...”

“... to be seen as a leader, a real man. She is out there front and centre. He’s not king of his castle.’ I know I have been introduced to him as a professor at MIT, something that usually protects me from such displays of candour. Has the mere fact of my husband’s presence and the assumption that he has paid for the evening transformed me into a woman ...”

“... have a gonk pencil-topper with crazy hands jiggling under his chin when he was writing The Castle. Then, about 1980, things took a definite turn towards the sun, and some saviour presented me with both a Sony Walkman and an Atari home video unit, made for people who were winning so big that the rest of the world would surely spend eternity catching ...”

“... devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his life to public service, and to train his sons to do the same. But they will be a new kind of public servant, designed for an emerging media age: they will ...”

“... and collect up the spaces between the palings of council fences: from these spaces he built his castle in Spain. Dryden’s heroic poems are mock-heroic; his only Hamlet the knowledge of what he couldn’t write. Among the public satires, Absalom and Achitophel is usually reckoned to be Dryden’s chief poem. Vivid and magnificent it certainly is, a triumph ...”

“... situation for a novelist is a character he didn’t invent walking about among those that he did. Barbara Pym’s novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, the one that was rejected by her traitorous publishers, sentencing her to fifteen years of non-appearance, has a man in it with whom she can do nothing at all, except let him marry the heroine at the end. This ...”

“... and hot milk, but you’d have thought, from the royal reaction, that she’d set fire to Windsor Castle (‘People in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster,’ the then queen wrote to her). Crawfie was cast out of the femly. Her book does reveal a shocking amount about the girls’ reading habits: ‘There was in the bookshelves a complete ...”

“... as Richard III: Richard’s bride was unlike the Queen in the play Richard III. She was played by Barbara O’Neil, who played Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in Gone with the Wind, though she wasn’t old enough to be. That’s the way I remember it.             Wait, she was actually Edward’s wife. Richard took unto him the Lady ...”

“... enters it in Book III of The Faerie Queene, and finds that she both is and is not in Bluebeard’s castle. ‘Romance’ is the most nebulous and ill-defined of literary genres, at moments seeming to embrace almost all non-realistic fiction, whether in prose or verse, narrative or dramatic form. It can even mesh with epic, as ‘the matter of ...”

“... an idea – ‘a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’; or the safe domestic medieval ‘Castle’ that Christabel begins her poem by leaving to pray ‘in silence’, leaving behind for ever the unambiguous virgin forms of her simple uncorrupt self. But it is the Ancient Mariner that has the most complete, most objective and narrational of these ...”