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“... which should have soared kept falling like lead. Too many of the stones that bury books now are stone heads and stone economics; and how many hands are trying and failing to reach the air? Toole’s book, at any rate, has got free, and one can only recommend its crisp comic evocations of New Orleans bowling alleys, police ...”

“... aristocratically beautiful and often connected with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward’s drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that ...”

“... image, every shadow still imprinted on my memory, seemed both homely and exotic. Tethered to the stone wall, next to the manger, was what I recognised as a white-faced Hereford cow, like those which grazed around the farm where I was growing up. The incongruity was normal. Places I saw in my Bible (‘A Fountain at Nazareth’, ‘Road from Jerusalem to ...”

“... and that, across the green-carpeted spaces, and reminded me to watch my step on the cantilevered stone Solar Stair that rises through the centre of the house in a light-filled spiral.Despite its maximalist appearance, Cosmic House is full of cheap MDF furniture and fittings. Cupboards, doors, mantles, worktops and floors are painted to resemble ...”

“... were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for ...”

“... being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ...”

“... antiquaries of the late 18th and early 19th century whose records of mysterious inscriptions, stone circles, monastic chronicles and ruined abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented. Some of these antiquaries are familiar to ...”

“... conflict since Vietnam, and Generation Kill, an account published in 2004 by the Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright of the battalion’s efforts to provide heroes during the blitzing of Iraq the previous year, gives a startling picture of tough young men up to their eyeballs in fantasy. ‘They were a new breed of warrior unrecognisable to their ...”

“... Lacking real fanaticism, which had in his eyes the deplorable effect of turning hearts to stone and ruining the beauty of such women as Maud Gonne and Constance Markiewicz, he found it possible to accept a British pension, to call in the Police when The Playboy of the Western World caused a riot at the Abbey, to be ambiguous about 1916. In all this he ...”

“... and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with Nabokov, Lillian’s fight with Mary, and Norman’s fights with everybody, were the Boy’s Own stories of my youth. I was 29 when my first book was discussed in the New York Review and before I even read the piece I felt victorious, because the issue opened with an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick. The ...”

“... simplicity itself as a disguise. What the wind blows away The wind blows back again is how Norman Nicholson ends a poem in his new collection, Sea to the West. The lines are perhaps low on witty morality, but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the ...”

“... nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!’ Of course James was speaking of America in the ...”

“... but not all, of what the early 12th-century monks of Glastonbury believed about their past. The Norman Conquest was a traumatic blow to the great Old English monasteries. They lost lands to the Conqueror’s followers. Their rituals were overhauled by enthusiastically reforming Norman abbots. Worst of all, the very ...”

“... Aline of brightly painted stone cottages, out there at the end of the world, beyond Allihies in West Cork. The cottages have been extensively tampered with, knocked through, until they form a single unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built ...”

“... so the leadership was as suddenly and completely Blair’s as if he had drawn a sword from the stone. He is now the Dauphin awaiting his inevitable inheritance and all men are on his side. His undoing is certain but it is far ahead and his courtiers do not yet talk of things like that. The upheavals in the Tory Party show a different face of the same ...”