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“... its existence is never guessed’ (that’s Proust, of course). With Philip Hensher, there’s no question of having to crank up an interest outside his constituency, since homosexuality has until now played a relatively small part in his fiction. The Northern Clemency (2008) showed an extraordinary flair for building up the large social picture, and the ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”

“... For once, the subsumer is subsumed. Humphrey Carpenter’s assiduously documented biography leaves no doubt about the centripetal force of Benjamin Britten’s personality. Nor about the centrifugal violence with which people unwise enough to let themselves be sucked into that centre were so often sent flying out of it again. In the testimony of those who ...”

“... on the meaning of his story are always sensible. Joseph Lanza despises intellectuals and has no more interest in being sensible than he has a talent for it. Elevator Music, subtitled ‘A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong’, is a dotty book, a tireless and tiring panegyric to musical trash, a history which is surreal only in the ...”

“... since last year marked the 250th anniversary of his death, he is guaranteed to feature on every hall and church programme. There is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year ...”

“... He died early in the new reign, but left nephew Charles a network of good connections. There is no record at all of Charles’s education. He would not share his prince’s intellectual interests, and his spelling is among the strangest in an era when inconsistency was the rule. Charles followed his father in becoming an enthusiastic swiver. He followed his ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will ...”

“... brought out of storage after the war, they were reinstated in the north-west corner of the Front Hall, where the present gift shop stands. This was not the end of Amaravati’s vicissitudes. By the Fifties, humidity and pollution had again started to erode the marbles. They were packed away and stored in the museum’s basement in atmospherically controlled ...”

“... the rabid. In principle we should all feel deep gratitude to Professor Camporesi for going where no one else has cared to go, in search of new light to cast on the mentalités of the past. Italy must be at, or near, the top of most lists of countries that we would want to hear from in the area of culinary history. In addition to food, Camporesi is interested ...”

“... and idiotic and likeable as they were – and, as Morecambe would winningly say, ‘there’s no answer to that.’ Eric was once asked what Ernie and he might have become had they not been comedians. His reply: Mike and Bernie Winters. Eric and Ernie were a double act, and so were Mike and Bernie. But that’s where the similarities end. The route from ...”

“... practising looping the loop, and that heart-stopping “falling leaf” descent – I have no recollection whatever of the Armistice of 1918.’ Mr Turner’s living-room has a collection of antique irons. One of his lamps is made from an old Veuve Clicquot bottle. You see plants here and there; a carpet-world of potted ivy; a teddy-bear out of time on ...”

“... primarily for the great annual public exhibitions and some of them exclusively for these, with no appropriate final destination. Special shows of one or two works of art, usually large ones, were also to be seen in Paris, although less often than in London, where the American artist Copley exhibited his Death of Chatham and his Death of Major Peirson in ...”

“... his house don’t seem to mind. Esteban might plead in mitigation that his wife, the pure Clara, no longer sleeps with him, preferring to cuddle up with his sister. Clara is an unusual sort of woman: she is a clairvoyant, surrounded by female spiritualists, and she made her mark as a little girl by shouting ‘fucked’ in church, during the priest’s ...”

“... was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage. Could a hereditary monarch, either by violating ...”