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“... articles and studies and many significant references in such biographies as Ann Thwaite’s of Edmund Gosse and, of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us ...”

“... the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’ No man of Wells’s temperament could resist such baiting, with the result that he and Rebecca West became lovers. Their ...”

“... and had a spiral staircase installed inside a semi-circular tower. He painted the internal walls white, laid floorboards reclaimed from a 17th-century house and set about filling the place with the found objects and pieces of furniture he felt worked best with his art collection. The collection itself had taken a while to acquire, much of it coming through ...”

“... a moment and then I knocked, three short raps. A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. Thus the narrator becomes the reader, and we share an ecstasy of wide-eyedness. Repeatedly, the novel returns to this function: as I was climbing out of the car, the moon came out from behind a cloud and I ...”

“... and interrogation cell as well as stage and studio: ‘I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long ... I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look.’ This explains the even, clinical light which bathes the portraits. Nothing is in ...”

“... and August 1789. The successive risings in the Vendée, the Lyon insurrection, the truly hideous White Terror in the Midi and the South-West in 1795, the actual invasions of Revolutionary France by émigré and foreign armies intent on re-establishing the monarchy, have been investigated by political, social and military historians. Far less attention has ...”

“... Commons dining-room.I play Sillery, now 80, though I can’t say I adjust the acting to the age, a white wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the ...”

“... retain something of their pre-war Edwardian air. The former librarian of the House of Lords, Sir Edmund Gosse, an old acquaintance of Sassoon’s, still cuts a dignified figure; it was indeed only in 1925, as Rupert Hart-Davis tells us in one of his meticulous (and most helpful) footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in ...”

“... in the annals of writerly spies – and who isn’t a spy who frisks people for a living? – the white-shoe boys at the Paris Review appear to have been better at mixing martinis than naming names.Graham Greene, you could say, had a spy’s soul, and the manners of a spy quite became him. In the autumn of 1953, when the Paris Review called at his flat in St ...”

“... from yonder Box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white.Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.This is a masterly satire on the bathos of global consumerism: objects from all around the world are yoked together by a violence which is deliberately suppressed by ...”

“... it must be that The Principle of Duty puts the work of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Edmund Burke in the shade. The Principle of Duty not only fails to live up to its billing: it is quite dreadful. It is querulous and pompous, written in a sort of demented lawyer-speak, full of misreadings of the writers Selbourne criticises – and even of those ...”

“... Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding ...”

“... and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and ...”

“... a new school of writing. It’s an idea, an image really, which has attracted me ever since I read Edmund Wilson’s early reviews of Stein, Hemingway, Woolf and Joyce; here was a man who, in the course of meeting his weekly deadline, just happened to chart the birth of Modernism. Oh sure, there was an element of luck involved – how often does a Ulysses just ...”

“... the blandest of experts at suggesting but never revealing his own private life, the English writer Edmund Gosse enthused on the resemblance of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the ...”