“... in art and architecture but also in music, theatre, cinema, literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire ...”

“... objected to what Vaughan Williams described in a note accompanying his own brass band work, the Henry V Overture, as bands’ use of a ‘vulgar sentimental vibrato’. He wanted trumpets rather than cornets to be used in his piece. Cornets are tuned at the same pitch as trumpets (B flat) but are more compact and have a conical bore – the tubing gradually ...”

“... played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to ...”

“... deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of the Morning Post, who gave themselves up to sparrings and scandals, and whose journalistic darts were dipped in poison. They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has ...”

“... of passing on her heritage – her knowledge of Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, Trollope and Henry James. Apart from Henry Green, Graham Greene and Adrian Bell, it seems that she hadn’t much use for contemporary authors. She was addicted to Scrabble and ‘Words from a ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”

“... unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to ...”

“... my Academy with gunmen?” ’ By 1940, O’Malley was closely involved with the circle round the Bell, the Irish journal founded by Sean O’Faolain with the old Republican and Communist Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam ...”

“... cast of characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann (former Communist, rabid anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover ...”

“... substance muttering to a dead animal sat down next to them on the Tube or rang their front-door bell? Among the new stars and saints to have emerged since the death of Beuys and Warhol is Jeff Koons. He is said to have been a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my ...”

“... so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates chosen for their cheapness (‘One was a pederast, another was a lunatic, a third was an alcoholic’), and became the oldest beneficed clergyman in ...”

“... his ‘credo’ and paused to pat, with pensive benevolence, a sculpture of a mother and child by Henry Moore is truly alarming. Stourton doesn’t conceal the loathing Alan expressed for his father in his diaries. But how to explain it? Perhaps it is as mysterious as the true motives of this avowed enemy of political correctness, whose confessions have done ...”

“... the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal castle evolved into a stately home fit for royalty, said to be ‘the greatest of any subject’s house in England’. Its nickname, Loyalty House – after the marquess of Winchester’s motto ...”

“... persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out: ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke, and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known ...”

“... Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a ...”