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“... contributes to his legend. His work was so successful as an advertisement for himself that Kenneth Tynan, I think rightly, observed: ‘even the youngest of us will know in fifty years’ time what we mean by “a very Noël Coward sort of person”.’ Like all great entertainers, Coward knew how to exploit his moment. In the Thirties Cyril Connolly ...”

“... the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd – sick with condemnation – howled and spat and wept. Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with ‘nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders’. Those two little offenders – if they were the offenders, the childish child-murderers from Walton – were caught on camera twice. First, on the security camera ...”

“... less than the Faroe, Icelandic and Norwegian whaling, which is scarcely noticed by anyone. Kenneth Pyle, author of Japan in the American Century, would not be confused for a second by Suga’s announcement, because in a book that devotes equal space to the view from Japan and the US, he shows equal discernment in recounting the ways in which each ...”

“... against danger. It was this trouble making sense of sleep in Darwinian terms which, in Kenneth Miller’s account, marginalised the topic of sleep in medical science until the 20th century. There was rather more investigation of these questions earlier than he implies, especially in Germany, but it’s a striking fact that a hundred years ago there ...”

“... hardly exhausts the list of groups which may have to be counted in any final power equation. The young township militants are unlikely to constitute a political grouping in their own right, but the potentially volatile way in which they may force issues could well have a major impact on the serious contenders. None of the other ‘homelands leaders’ has a ...”

“... was quite a lot to blame for the phenomenon of A.A. Milne and Pooh Bear, when they were very young. The atmosphere of enlightened upper-middle-class fun and games, in a new world where to be young was very heaven, suffuses Rupert Brooke’s life and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of ...”

“... you get a clear idea, as you could never get from the popular writers, of the dilemma by which Kenneth Slessor was later both impelled and inhibited, and which A.D. Hope has spent his life resolving – triumphantly, in my view – into poetry. Brennan’s background was the Irish famine. In Sydney he grew up speaking the language of the oppressor. But as ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... has a fondness for dramatic use of Georgia’s Rico law. In one case, she charged the rapper Young Thug and his record label YSL, or Young Stoner Life, of parallel operation as a street gang called Young Slime Life that was responsible for a decade of carjacking, drug ...”

“... and his surprisingly tender and encouraging letters to members of his family, to aspiring young authors and to the few people – Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance – whom he loves or admires. It is a daunting thought, particularly as no one seems ever to have thrown away a letter from Thomas or Jane: the libraries of the world are stuffed with ...”

“... after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are ...”

“... already famous for the first volume of his romance. What is more, although the duchess is a very young woman and Cervantes already an elderly man, she falls in love with him. They do not meet again: but she eagerly awaits the second volume of Don Quixote, in which, she does not doubt, she will find a romantic tribute to herself. It arrives in December ...”

“... full of left-wing political feeling. The rise of Hitler had provoked many hitherto non-political young people to agitated concern about the future of Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal ...”

“... to illustrate. Critics, by contrast, invent categories which facts cannot invalidate. For example, Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the naked and the nude stands as long as we agree that pictures of unclothed people can be assigned to either the nakedness pile or the nudity pile. A comparison or anecdote may suggest why pictures in a critical category ...”

“... A lexicographer lurks behind the eponymous expositor of Van Winkle’s Return. Van Winkle is Kenneth Wilson, a Professor of English who in 1966 nodded off into a deep snooze of administration, from which, twenty years later, he awoke, to find himself once more a teacher and scholar. Things had been happening while he slumbered in college Deanship and ...”