“... in living standards – ‘Now there appears to be but one order of people, a middle Class as they may be called’ (Tuesday, 14 September) – while deploring the general lack of decorum. Madame Récamier comes in for censure on the low cut of her dress. There are also revealing accounts of major artistic and political personalities, including a description ...”

“... to die young, preferably of consumption. Their women, if their tastes lie in this direction, may be called to matrimony and motherhood: but they are seldom given to authorship, and they are not encouraged to own independent musical personalities. These preconditions leave a clear field for the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters or the industry of ...”

“... though never entirely of their number, was the poet, philosopher, novelist and spiritualist May Sinclair, the inauspicious subject of May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, a serene, elegant biography by Suzanne Raitt. ‘Inauspicious’ because Sinclair, living in interesting times, contrived to spend most of her days in ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed ...”

“... as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard Chandler wrote in the journals he published a decade after their return to England, ‘several of the Turks murmured, and some threatened, because he overlooked their houses; obliging them to confine or remove the women, to prevent their being seen from ...”

“... a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his ideas as ‘ridiculous’ and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, but the excitement generated by his musings on Russian society, and especially by his essay ‘Russophobia’ which ...”

“... by Al Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the ...”

“... Country House. The first edition was published by the Clarendon Press in 1971 and it remains, it may well be argued, the author’s finest achievement. In a field in which Georgian ‘taste’ and ‘proportion’ were still uncritically revered, the book was one of the first which did not treat Victorian country houses as monstrosities or as ...”

“... John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or Japan would be. Having those permanent garrisons abroad ‘keeps countries from doing things you ...”

“... to deal with miscarriages of justice. It noted the criticism of the Home Office made by Sir John May, who led an inquiry into the cases of the Guildford Four and also the Maguire Seven, whose convictions were quashed in June 1991. May wrote that the Home Office’s ‘approach … was throughout reactive, it was never ...”

“... Of Haddon-Riddoch the publishers say only that he ‘started’ as a trap collector, of whom there may be more than we would think. An earlier, slimmer version of his book appeared in 2001. Its title is not the least of its oddities; it is as if the public hangman had published a rundown on drops and nooses called ‘Urban Reveries’. Fundamentally, it is a ...”

“... same and also different. To adult children who have not yet needed to care for their parents, or may never, lucky dogs, this may be a cautionary tale.’ ‘Diagnosis is everything,’ she tells us at the outset. Her advice? Challenge doctors: ‘Doctors are not gods, though some act that way. Some hate being ...”

“... of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them. Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been ...”