“... a pair of models, but they ‘looked sleazy’. The artist engaged to produce the paintings, Charles Raymond, took one look and said: ‘I’ll do it with my wife.’ He recalled that during the shoot, ‘We got carried away, and [the photographer] disappeared.’ This was how the images ended up depicting a quite ordinary-looking, slightly alternative ...”

“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”

“... on. But one of the youngest delegates to the drafting congress, the 25-year-old Gouverneur Morris, tweaked it so that it now read: ‘We, the People of the United States …’ Colley points out that a united American nation, let alone a single ‘people’, didn’t yet exist. But with those sonorous words read and reprinted across the world, it ...”

“... not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... direction’ that could have been developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites had a similar impact on Morris. With Bloomsbury, Sharratt said that we might look at the avenue Keynes opened up by connecting economic theory with psychoanalysis. Sharratt’s argument was that though these groups might have been re-absorbed, they always left a subversive residue, a ...”

“... few notches in an old man’s teeth to positing the existence of pathological cult killers of the Charles Manson variety, to use the Turners’ own analogy (in interviews, Christy Turner has also drawn comparisons with Hitler, Genghis Khan and Stalin), who first terrorised and then destroyed Anasazi society, clearly requires a huge imaginative leap. Turner ...”

“... second-hand car dealing, he used as a typical example an imaginary ‘ordinary’ person selling a Morris Minor (last produced in 1972, when Rees-Mogg was three) and buying a Ford Cortina (last produced in 1982). Speaking of strikes in the 1970s, he said: ‘All of us have memories of mass meetings, Red Robbo and the will of the membership being entirely ...”

“... an informer? The question has exercised her biographers. They all agree that the collaborator was Charles Delval, executed in January 1945. But from then on they differ. Jean Vallier, author of the massive two-volume C’était Marguerite Duras, dismisses the story as her invention. But his argument is unconvincing: he writes that she was so short that she ...”

“... of pleasure.’ There were jobs for all, but few could yet afford even a little Standard or Morris Ten, and most had never dreamt of Mediterranean tours. Seaside holidays boomed. ‘The late Forties marked the peak of the Victorian resorts.’ Billy Butlin, who had invented the holiday camp and had opened two in the late Thirties, had provided three ...”

“... in January 1948 garnered little attention, and nothing sold from a de Kooning exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in April. ‘Isolation,’ Greenberg wrote that year, was ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, and soon the Existentialist talk of alienation was matched by the political reality, as the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...”

“... during the Boer War. Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former ...”

“... week at least, Wilde was as much an ordinary man as a flamboyant artist who willed his own demise. Charles Ricketts, who designed books for him, wrote that ‘most writers on Wilde see in him the aesthete, the predestined victim of a theory, and the martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other ...”

“... Bletchley. In 1940 he had met an attractive, capable, independent-minded Girtonian called Jennifer Morris, daughter of the town clerk of Westminster; the couple were married early in 1945 – the reception was at the Savoy; Attlee made the principal speech – and it remained a close, mutually supportive marriage, of a distinctly traditional kind, for the ...”

“... state of affairs that exists is what Hill came to call, in a favourite phrase taken from William Morris, ‘plutocratic anarchy’, or ‘Anarchical Plutocracy’, or ‘oligarchic democracy’, or ‘oligarchic mob rule’, something which became a preoccupying theme. ‘I think at certain periods in our history some good poets have felt they have a ...”