“... lurking there, too: of stealth, on the visitors’ part; of unpreparedness, on the part of the home team. You can know, in the sense of being acquainted with, certain social refinements, and a character asserts, with some show of truth in the particular context, that ‘men don’t know’ about such things. Or rather: ‘They know in such matters almost ...”

“... through the system. A few weeks after I first met Andy and Martha, I visited Michael at his home in North-West London. He showed me a letter sent by the Ministry of Defence to his late mother, Mary, in 2011 and signed by the defence secretary at the time, Liam Fox. ‘I apologise for Majella’s death and offer you my heartfelt sympathy,’ it ...”

“... it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the ...”

“... of voyaging long distances the better to fret about some spoiled darling left behind in the Home Counties’. But his most furious barbs are reserved for Norman Podhoretz, the reactionary editor of Commentary. Hitchens seems almost obsessed by him, returning to the attack over and over again. It is a curious fact that Podhoretz, an immodest man who has ...”

“... Ancien Régime deserved the devoted service that men like him had given it. His Letter to a Noble Lord, written in 1797 after the death of his only son, gives vent to a deep bitterness at the contrast between his concern for the welfare of aristocratic England and aristocratic flirtation with revolutionary ideas that would bring down the whole edifice. The ...”

“... If so, they are in respectable company. Paul Johnson (described in this paper some years ago by Lord Blake as the greatest living British journalist) has declared in the Spectator that he found the book ‘morbidly compulsive from start to finish’. It starts in a world that is now very remote. Huffington evokes Belle Epoque Paris as it would have seemed ...”

“... of their marriage, Alma supported them both, selling dresses at Arnold Constable, Macy’s and Lord & Taylor. She seems to have been the one who handled financial matters, while Singer hid behind the persona of humble immigrant. In his old age and after his death, she would pester friends to get better deals on royalties, or to negotiate a fat sum for the ...”

“... the folk consciousness of the Almanacs. Songs for Political Action includes a number of amateur home-recordings, among them a capella attacks on a 1947 Congressional Bill to enforce the registration of all CP members and a heartfelt tribute to the Party press. ‘A paper with a message, a paper with the science, a paper with a love for all ...”

“... behavior and the uselessness and regressiveness of her specialism has not gone unnoticed back home. At the airport before takeoff, she opened the Atlantic to find herself and her research singled out as particularly pointless by a New York intellectual called L.D. Zimmern. Zimmern is someone Lurie-readers have met previously: briefly a member of the ...”

“... greeting. Time after time have I gone out looking for a woman, and time after time have I returned home alone, because I have not had the courage to lake advantage of a woman’s encouragement. This is the reason why I have never made a mistake in accosting a respectable married woman, in spite of my dealings with scores of other strange women, through a ...”

“... introduced to the capital by Mateo, his worldly uncle, and by Daniel, a young dandy who plays the Lord Henry Wotton to Gabriel’s Dorian Gray. ‘Daniel will be good for the boy – or bad for him, it comes to the same thing,’ according to Mateo. The art that Mateo admires consists of ‘small but daring experiments within an exhausted ...”

“... tale not the teller? But, more important, the ‘subtle unsoundness’ which Marlow detected in Lord Jim is not only a part of Conrad himself but an essential part of the way literature and duality work together. Never mind about the ship at the end, and the way the captain, to do service to his double, risks his first command: what matters to Conrad and to ...”

“... a majority of us supported Kennedy and his call for a more active, adept government both at home and abroad. In one way or another we were influenced by the liberal academic culture that spread across America’s leading campuses after World War Two: but we were a diverse bunch, producing a best-selling right-wing author (George Gilder), a leading ...”

“... late start as a writer. Agnes Sanderson, sister of a Harrovian friend, later described the London home of Galsworthy’s parents in a devastating vignette that makes one want to know more about her: ‘the atmosphere of Victorian propriety, the dumb immaculate servants, the low flannelety Galsworthyian voices, killed all life in us.’ She also recalled ...”

“... to her sofa at 25. He had asthma and she had migraine – and they very soon ceased to have sex. Home life was irregular and inequitable. Her elder sister was first dumped with and later adopted by prosperous maternal relations who pampered her. ‘Fryn’ (a self-made contraction of ‘Wynifried’ which seems to have been quite typical of her ...”