“... Boydell launched his Shakespeare Gallery, commissioning artists to paint scenes from the plays; Robert Bowyer opened a gallery of paintings illustrating scenes from Hume’s History of England. These and other such ventures were to be funded both by exhibiting the paintings themselves and engraving them for sale, whether as prints to be framed or as book ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... create a savage divorce between fact and feeling. One is reminded of Monet, at the deathbed of his young wife, irresistibly noting her skin colour – and horrified at the artist in him. In Chatwin, the unsparing clarity of vision and his feeling for the cruel and ambivalent were all of a piece. His prose walked a knife-edge. He respected the primitive – but ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... these generalities. It includes Classical buildings – Quinlan Terry’s Richmond scheme and Robert Adam’s computer centre at Dogmersfield Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s ...”

“... in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press Room. Therein, dead-centre, was a small stage flooded with television lights, and on the stage a couple of black leatherette TV armchairs. An airport ...”

“... in the Lords and bask, as perhaps we shouldn’t, in the praise we get afterwards. If we meet young people, we invariably find them of real interest – they tend to be bright and good-looking and to bode well for the future. If we are able to separate ourselves from our guide (and it isn’t easy to walk out on him, it must be said), we will usually ...”

“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... for touch-me-not persons. Diana-Titania falls helplessly in love with a comic version of the very young man whom she had cruelly enchanted with the stag’s head and horns. Bully Bottom, monster of the comic baroque, becomes the creature she dotes upon. Thus the baroque acts both to fantasise the personal and explore, in the most searchingly realistic ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... the Queen. There is indeed some truth in all these comparisons; and Britten himself changed. The young prodigy of Donald Mitchell’s book can be admired in the unshakable security of his historical position, revolutionising insular British music and performance, and almost single-handedly recreating British opera; the older man is increasingly (and latterly ...”

“... on the cover of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a ...”

“... the road, she drags herself along, semi-invited, to a New Year’s Eve party at the Skidelskys (‘Robert ... is a brilliant historian who was made a lord this summer’). Needless to say, none of these occasions turns out quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more ...”