“... of the family, is watched and questioned by his spinster aunt Fanny; the dinner where Eugene Morgan, in love with George’s mother, the last of the Ambersons, sees the truth in a thoughtless insult by George and says that though cars have made his fortune, men may come to think they were something that ‘had no business to be invented’ – all these ...”

“... young Lord Stafford and Lady G. were eventually acted out in full view of the tabloids by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. James knew a dramatic subject. In some contemporary writing about lone, long-suffering and much-photographed female celebrities who have haunted our dreams, there is an attempt to compare them to figures from Greek tragedy. In ...”

“... 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Was it the clothes? As a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan wore white gloves to the office, and her vintage wardrobe and showy ...”

“... themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection J.P. Morgan gloated: ‘I hear Berenson’s gone to Philadelphia to bust up Widener’s collection.’ And to promote their services, the Berensons had to suppress their refined nausea at plutocratic vulgarity. At one house they sat through a concert of organ-grinders ...”

“... who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago. I have always been ...”

“... he was taking part. His critics were more confident; they set him in the company of Middleton, Morgan, Tindal and Bolingbroke – Hume and Voltaire are also prominent, but the assault on Gibbon as an ‘English Voltaire’ responsible for the French Revolution necessarily belongs to the 1790s more than the 1770s – and to this mainly English coterie they ...”

“... who put the case most fervently for her generosity, tolerance, humanity, and her universalism: Charles Péguy, the socialist utopian and author of the long miracle play, Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, which he dedicated to her and ‘à toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu leur vie humaine’. One of the speakers was Florence Delay ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”

“... is much fun to be had from a house with rooms named after Arthurian characters (‘The ceiling of Morgan le Fay was not in perfect repair’); but there is genuine reverence here, too, as ‘Gothic’ comes to stand, as it did for Ruskin, for everything that gets destroyed by modernity. Tony likes attending church on Sunday and chatting in a paternalistic way ...”

“... of ‘historical London figures’ and ‘modern day heroes’. Ada (Lovelace), who worked with Charles Babbage on his ‘analytical engine’, is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as ...”

“... Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during the last war … The workers were leaving the factory for the lunch-hour break. All at once I seemed to ...”

“... over his lifetime is ‘the scale and speed of the collapse in religious adherence’. He quotes Charles Taylor, who argues that we now live in a world where ‘faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.’ Brown also cites with approval John Rawls’s notion of the ‘overlapping consensus’. He summarises it as ...”

“... provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented challenge. Harried by the ...”

“... blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one of his ...”

“... capital punishment, but in other states 25 people were executed in 2018.)Barr later cites the Charles Bronson vigilante movie, Death Wish, and the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies as evidence that ‘it’s satisfying to see justice done.’At​ the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Christmas Hill Park in Gilroy, California, a 19-year-old white ...”