“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh Craft ...”

“... Biblical ideal of the godly bishop. Reminded of this mood later in life, Aylmer replied with St Paul: ‘When I was a child I spoke as a child ...’ Reality had intervened. A balance needed to be struck between Church and State; the clergy had to learn the same political rules as everyone else; and bishops could only hope to resist the Erastian ambitions ...”

“... vanity . . . Dear Caroline’s perverseness makes me wretched whenever I think of it.’ Paul Douglass does not conceal the widespread belittlement and criticism of Caroline Lamb, but whenever it is at all possible to do so, he takes a charitable view of his heroine. He gives her, he tells us, ‘my sympathy, my laughter and astonishment, my ...”

“... attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”

“... geriatrics (the only remarkable book about the elderly that immediately comes to mind is Angus Wilson’s marvellous and still not widely enough known Late Call): so one admires Ms Lamming’s decision to build her story round a half-senile widower, Arnold Lawson, who has just moved into a new district and is exciting the curiosity of the local newspaper ...”

“... them with fancy-dress pageants.The first signs of a new American dispensation came with Woodrow Wilson, who considered Central America a field for democratic tutelage, with interventions between 1913 and 1916 in Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ‘We have with armed force invaded, made war upon, and conquered the two small republics,’ Teddy ...”

“... he is now remembered. The story of the three trials is the superbly dramatic centrepiece of Ben Wilson’s fine new biography of Hone, the first for nearly a century. It tells many more stories besides: that, for example, of the brilliant investigative journalism by which Hone sought to vindicate the serving-maid Eliza Fenning, hanged for attempting to ...”

“... is best remembered now for the somewhat suspect boom he unleashed as chancellor in 1962-64. Harold Wilson, worried that the Tories led by Maudling might be unbeatable, always claimed that the 1967 devaluation was the ultimate result of Maudling’s irresponsible stimulus of the economy – and the mud stuck. In fact, this was unfair in that it never addressed ...”

“... words were lethal weapons. The Bible didn’t offer much justification for laughter. Saint Paul, for instance, told the Ephesians not to indulge in ‘foolish talking or jesting’. Only the example of Elijah, who taunted the false prophets of Baal, seems to show that, as the 17th-century theologian Isaac Barrow wrote, ‘facetious wit’ was sometimes ...”

“... and ‘the incredible coherence’ of Andean culture. In a 2018 interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Vicuña said that ‘the physical act of making actions, exhibitions, objects and so forth … cannot change anything if it is not loaded with the clearest intent, and the most intense orientation, towards touching other forms of awareness.’ She was ...”

“... Stroud … Since 1949, the subject has been neglected by nearly everyone with the exception of Mr Paul Mellon, whose Collection, now partly at the Yale Centre for British Art, is steeped in this type of estate portraiture.’ This is a work of reference which, like Girouard’s book, is not merely for the architectural historian: the genre of country-house ...”

“... which claim to speak directly of the times we live in. ‘The Watering Place’ after Peter Paul Rubens by John Browne (1770) There is, however, nothing irrelevant about the new show at the Royal Academy, featuring Gainsborough, Constable and Turner; not because of anything it has to say about ‘the making of landscape’, but because it is so ...”

“... in this direction (the mainstream media call it ‘isolationist’) – among them, Senator Rand Paul and the conservative TV news host Tucker Carlson. In the absence of his third sacked national security adviser, 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 ...”

“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”