“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... Reich and act accordingly!”’ He had captured the imagination of the ‘counterculture’. Norman Mailer, who dismissed psychoanalysts as ‘ball shrinkers’, promoted him in the Village Voice (‘intellectuals,’ he told Turner, ‘never had good orgasms’). For Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs he was the only analyst worth taking seriously ...”

“... their latest book. Only once, in this selection, does he not like a book: I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, though nothing happened as a result, and the correspondence fizzles out. He has a feeling for the rigours of old age and writes helpfully to the ill and bereaved. He was always affectionate and rather awestruck by the philosopher Owen Barfield, and ...”

“... English house. Morris’s own first home, the Red House, at Bexleyheath, designed for him by Philip Webb in 1859, was, Muthesius decided, ‘the first private house of the new artistic culture’. This was an exaggeration which imparted a mythic status to the Red House as a pivotal point in architecture that sometimes hangs about it still. Muthesius was ...”

“... of clean design and smart engineering, he was associated not only with Rogers but also with Norman Foster (Rogers partnered Foster before he teamed up with Piano). All three young architects sought a way beyond modern architecture that would both retain its economic efficiencies and extend its technical advances; to this end they were inspired by the ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... problems of coordinating foreign policy within the Commonwealth (as is shown by the essay by Dr Norman Hillmer, ‘The Foreign Office, the Dominions and the Diplomatic Unity of the Empire 1925-29’), and the responsibility which lay with the British Navy for the guaranteeing of the security of the Dominions. When, by the early 1930s, the Australians were ...”

“... time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a finger-wagging lecture from a guest, so that the ...”

“... saw Keating’s criminal career exposed, largely through the diligence of the art critic Geraldine Norman, who had become suspicious about the number of Samuel Palmers coming on the market. She later helped Keating write his autobiography and he went on to have a career as a minor celebrity with his own television show.Did I like my picture more because of ...”

“... England and Scotland is exhilaratingly explored by the essayists captained by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones, who scrutinise it severally from linguistic, historical and literary perspectives. What emerges is the importance of the British Empire in cementing the KJB’s reputation. During the later 17th century, KJB language, already self-consciously ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... she chose for debate included ‘That this House thanks Heaven for little girls’. Her boyfriend, Philip May, who was two years below her, succeeded her as president of the Edmund Burke and went on, unlike his future wife, to become president of the Union in an election where he saw off more fancied candidates – including Damian Green and Alan Duncan ...”

“... design: to stop Stalker. On the basis of his interim report Stalker has been appointed by Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Police, to conduct a full inquiry into the part played by the RUC in the 1982 killings. Impatient to resume his task, he is frustrated by administrative obstacles which are put in his way: but finally decides to ...”

“... His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in Italy, where he worked for a time as ...”

“... revolt’: ‘his attack is nothing less than the raising of a revolutionary call,’ ‘Professor Norman [sic] Godden, the new Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, is totally opposed to the idea.’ Cunningham’s ‘Maldon’-joke about the teachers of Old English moving ‘across Faculty business in the tight Germanic wedge formation they’ve ...”