“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... of the Chinese devil doctor Fu Manchu, the invention of an Edwardian hack-writer and music-hall lyricist who called himself Sax Rohmer. Fu Manchu has green eyes, a close-shaven skull, a long silken robe, an Arabian slave-girl and a performing marmoset; and he wages war on the West, pretty much for the hell of it, with the aid of a small army of ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... satire novel, tragicomic melodramatic epistolary lyrical); rhetoric (Homeric Pickwickian, music hall biblical, kinky political). He is credited by the OED with coining the term ‘poetism’, which suggests his misgivings about what poetry had the potential to become as well as his willingness to screw up his own aspirations to poetical effect. But screwing ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... art history? The introduction notes three kinds of response. Most straightforwardly, to fashion a hall of fame; more ingeniously, to trace patterns across time (‘typologies’); or more ingeniously yet, to relativise (‘Artists saw it that way then and see it this way now’). But Wood doesn’t settle for any of them: he has a philosopher’s desire to ...”

“... secret negotiations ensued.Stettheimer’s painting imagines such a merger in the Met’s Great Hall, with museum directors, trustees, critics and dealers (her ‘victims’, as she called them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling ...”

“... Robert never saw him again. His older brother, heir to the family property, including Stratford Hall, later earned the nickname ‘Black Horse’ for his transgressions: first, he seduced and impregnated his wife’s teenage sister (the baby died in suspicious circumstances); then he defrauded her family and fled to Paris. Robert was raised by his mother ...”

“... were rubbed raw by the coarseness of American life, but, unlike Mrs Trollope, Captain Basil Hall and Charles Dickens, he could draw on the mutual regard that the War of Independence had created between the Americans and their French allies, and see the democratic virtues that lay beneath the rough exterior. More than than, he approached America with an ...”

“... of a Fifties Labour Party Conference with a speech about his pensions scheme which brought the hall to its feet. I know because I was there, and I will never forget Dick’s expression of slowly dawning delight when he realised he had pulled off a triumph against all the odds. The second was in office when, as Social Services Secretary, he produced a White ...”

“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”

“... the broken windows ... and the rain coming through the roof’ to Caroline Blackwood’s Dunmartin Hall (in Great Granny Webster), with puddles in the corridors and warped doors, the Anglo-Irish house has characteristically fallen a victim to disrepair. There are, of course, a good many symbolic points to be adduced from this. McCormack goes to some lengths to ...”

“... the resources of the Empire in the national interest, they ran it as a branch of Toynbee Hall. Instead of adapting the educational system to fit the requirements of a nation competing for markets, they indulged in the fraudulent exercise, much trumpeted by Classics dons, of liberal humanism for the masses. Part One of the Barnett Report dealt with ...”

“... hear the words. But music in such a mood could not, I think, encourage mugging or bar-room, dance-hall brawls, as rock music can – not unless the rhythm, the beat, is changed, to parody the original. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange pretended that a lively-eared punk could be turned on to street violence by Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: but plain readers ...”

“... Club, Conservative Central Office, Daily Mail leader writer). He escorted Elizabeth to Pakenham Hall and Dunsany Castle, home of Uncle Eddie (‘Lord Insany’). The courtship, though beset by difficulties, was virtuous; once, invited by hosts to share a room, they resorted to ‘bundling’, with a bolster down the middle of the bed. At last came a good ...”