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“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... Martin Edwards ultimately made £93 million selling his Manchester United shares bit by bit. Sir John Hall and his family made £75 million when they did the same with their stake in Newcastle United. Arsenal’s shareholders, including descendants of upper-class gents who held the shares from the 1920s and had never taken a penny out, banked £300 ...”

“... classed as a ‘heavy worker’. Nor was he the head of the household: that was his father-in-law, John Coomber, who had been a sailor in the royal and merchant navies. Now, at 46, he was employed by the government at Woolwich Arsenal ‘making war medals’, which sounds dismal and more like a postwar employment scheme than a real job. The only two living ...”

“... Laughton from the 1960s volume, and was he or she later fired for incompetence? Was Radclyffe Hall left out of the Forties volume because she was unlikely to be remembered, or because she was best forgotten? Was it a prejudice against social anthropology, or against British Middle Europeans that led to the exclusion of Malinowski from the same volume? Or ...”

“... Grant skilfully shows how modes of speech capture attitudes. He quotes Sir Edward Marshall Hall QC, ‘doyen of criminal advocates, in the defence of Madame Fahmy, on trial in 1923 for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy hotel’: She discovered for the first time that he had not only the vilest of vile tempers, but was vile himself with ...”

“... partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a daughter; Smith was ...”

“... suggestive emails he had sent to a woman whose organisation had received funding from City Hall. Jasper blamed ‘the racist nature of a relentless media campaign’ for his resignation. All this has been terrible for Livingstone. He seemed very slow to understand how damaging these allegations were, and keener to sling around accusations of racism ...”

“... else they can think of – in Fenton and Fuller’s collaborative book of light verse, Partingtime Hall. I especially enjoyed the public-school master Mountgrace-church MacDiarmid’s taste in literature: Selected John Ashbery, Schuyler, O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others ...”

“... back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John Stokes is synchronic and aims to show how the arts were related to other aspects of the life of their own time, fixing on certain ‘topics and texts’ – the New Journalism, the New Art Criticism, the Music ...”

“... a crowd of avant-garde aficionados and local music enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a ...”

“... This book is about the career of John Soane up to the age of 31. As Soane only started to build when he was 28, as all his important work was done after he was 35, as he practised architecture till his retirement at 80 and died at 83, it will be seen that the biographical coverage is likely to attract the dedicated specialist rather than the general reader ...”

“... filled the area behind what is now St Peter’s Square with grand buildings such as the Free Trade Hall (now a hotel) and Manchester Central railway station (now a conference centre). Leigh’s set designers therefore built early 19th-century Manchester in an Elizabethan fort on the Thames. The post-production editor was busy on his laptop erasing the ...”

“... of Surgeons hangs the portrait by Joshua Reynolds of the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. It has been much darkened by the bitumen content of Reynolds’s paint, and restoration work in the Fifties has not been able to prevent the fading into the surrounding gloom of many of its supporting details. Only Hunter’s face, once bathed in ...”

“... that he specialised in giving to his characters. In the seven novels he produced between Headlong Hall (1815) and Gryll Grange (1860), names are rarely hard to decode. Anyside Antijack is a time-serving Tory politician; Cephalis Cranium, a phrenologist’s brainy daughter; the Revd Mr Grovelgrub, a sycophantic tutor; Dr Harry Killquick, a hit-or-miss ...”

“... Board’s largesse. The recent publication in Britain of works by three such figures – Rodney Hall, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse – provides a convenient occasion for assessment. Rodney Hall’s career neatly exemplifies current trends. Hall began his literary life as a ...”