“... touch with the rural revivalists. Rolf Gardiner at Springhead in Dorset was trying to ‘rebuild a hill-and-vale economy along modern organic lines’, at once reducing local unemployment and staging work camps where the educated could sing and dance after heaving their forkloads of muck. Viscount Lymington, Eliot’s farming friend in Hampshire, the leader of ...”

“... of people we have never met. Years ago, walking down Heath Street, I saw, at the bottom of the hill by the station, the most extraordinary glow in the air. I was still too far away to see what was causing the strange disturbance, but as I got closer the picture resolved itself into two figures encased in a golden shimmer, the light zinging around ...”

“... this year. Both have covers featuring Boty with one of her best-known paintings, With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962). On the Gazelli book she sits below it, wearing a high-necked dress and looking down coyly at the cat on her lap. On Kristal’s she is in front of it, staring straight out, naked. Boty saw parallels between herself and Marilyn Monroe, whom ...”

“... But there were others who came with ambitions to fabricate wholly new worlds, cities on a hill, where life could be made better, happier or morally more complete. In the Catholic South such experiments were largely confined to various attempts to reconstruct the primitive apostolic Church. One Franciscan, with an annotated copy of More’s book in his ...”

“... to the Scottish major’s lecture on the Spirit of the Bayonet: Afterwards I went up the hill to my favorite sanctuary, a wood of hazels and beeches. The evening air smelt of wet mould and wet leaves; the trees were misty green; the church bell was tolling in the town, and smoke rose from the roofs. Peace was there in the twilight ... But the ...”

“... performance of literary voices into a sort of belated act of espionage. Amis’s fictional Paul Doll becomes history’s Rudolph Höss, and a film crew drops in on the German camp commandant and his family as they go about their daily lives. We see how ordinary it is, or how ordinary it would be if it weren’t for the noises coming from the camp next ...”

“... be circumnavigated by the simple device of describing a bar as a ‘private members’ club’. Paul Raymond, patron of the Revuebar, was so determined to give his club an air of respectability that he appointed a Church of England chaplain and played the national anthem after shows.But Raymond and his fellow club owners were also prepared to pay the fines ...”

“... A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times of desperate financial pressure’ – can he be referring to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic renaissance’? – museums ‘cannot exist simply as a receptacle guarding our heritage, or as a ...”

“... Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their cohort as ‘an outbreak of talent’ and helped Ravilious and Bawden to find work as engravers, creating bookplates and illustrations for the small presses, especially Curwen. Ravilious was called ‘the ...”

“... it was a different sort of footballer he reminded me of. The person he brought to mind was Paul Gascoigne, someone he closely resembles. Like McBride, Gascoigne has done his share of tours of the daytime TV sofas recently to provide penitent but unabashed accounts of his past behaviour. The two men have similar faces, once boyish, now damaged (though ...”

“... of fashionable portraits – among those in the exhibition are the young Ranuccio Farnese, Pope Paul III and Titian’s friend and publicist Pietro Aretino. The last two are remarkable for the way they use clothes as a kind of landscape – the Pope’s cape rising like a hill to support the head and Aretino’s rich ...”

“... in the exhibition have the sky that fades from vibrant blue to pale yellow; three have a rocky hill, distant buildings and a reflecting lake; all include dark evergreen foliage against which naked figures stand out. And the figures – above all the pale young women, sometimes Eve, sometimes Venus, sometimes another deity – are standard too. Cranach Girl ...”

“... Pahlen is. The latter quotes without comment another writer’s judgment that Mendelssohn’s St Paul and particularly Elijah, first performed in Birmingham, created ‘a sense of spiritual community in the audience’. Perhaps not surprisingly, no 19th-century English composers of oratorios are included except Elgar, who is given fewer paragraphs than the ...”

“... featured a boy’s sexual ‘relationship’ with his sister’s Barbie and introduced us to Paul and Elaine Weiss, a pair of ‘unrulyweds’ who live in a commuter town outside New York and who experiment with smoking crack as a way to deal with midmarriage ennui. The couple returned in the novel Music for Torching (1999), in which they set fire to ...”

“... disarming smile. There is a scene in which he and his three helpers – Pomeroy, the psychologist, Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist, and the statistician Clyde Martin – assemble in the attic studio to make a film. Kinsey briefs them about the next subject who, he tells them, can have 15 to 20 orgasms in 20 minutes, the first one two to five seconds after ...”