“... a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin called her a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... immediate target was de Tocqueville’s countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose ...”

“... that one of the troubles with the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock’s leadership was that it was no longer the kind of party which attracted the loyalty and service of Oxbridge intellectuals. In his view, this was a serious flaw, perhaps even a fatal one. There is, of course, something in the charge. For all his many qualities, which include courage and ...”

“... itself as a means of piercing behind the veil – an alternative to the religious faith that no longer provided the certainty for which Tennyson and his host of readers yearned. In 1855 an American medium, Daniel Dunglas Home, caused a sensation in Britain and on the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... diplomatic descent of this country from the Victorian era to the defeat of France in 1940. It was no accident, Barnett argued, that British governments made so many disastrous mistakes, culminating in the ill-starred policy of fair play for Hitler. There was a fundamental cause in the cultural history of the élite: the triumph of Victorian values. According ...”

“... reluctant to go to bed. The nightmares often feature bones and the excrement of animals ... Freud no doubt would explain the persistent symbols, but I have sometimes dreamt of Freud performing such an explication, not very satisfactorily ... ’ Burgess’s second new book, The End of the World News, is a novel built of three stories, one of them a sceptical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...”

“... styling himself H.P. wrote to the chef Alexis Soyer to complain that in the whole city there was no chophouse ‘suitable to men accustomed to have everything good, clean and comfortable at home’. George Augustus Sala wrote in 1894 that ‘vile gravy’ and ‘badly-roasted’ fowl served for high prices in drab rooms was the norm for London hotel dinners ...”

“... to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with Hall Caine or Jeffery Farnol – but there was enough enjoyable reading there to keep me busy for quite a while. A couple of years later, a generous Welsh bibliophile my parents knew gave me the first forty volumes of the Edinburgh Review, along with Foxe’s ...”

“... for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed. We think of South Africa in the early 1990s as a heartening example. ‘A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost,’ the journalist Colin Eglin said, ‘and an imprisoned leader of a ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”