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“... of entertainment to have been written in modern times, comparable in its passion and panache to Kenneth Tynan’s theatre reviews in the post-war period, but without the golly-goshery that mars Tynan’s work. It seems likely to last as long as anyone cares about words rising to the challenge of such images. One of the central tenets of James’s TV ...”

“... than the simple-minded (and hypocritically self-serving) appeal to ‘just the facts’ made by Kenneth Starr. Ironically, one of the most time-honoured techniques of political rhetoric is the appeal to truth and the accusation of base mendacity levelled against one’s opponents. Hitchens’s No One Left to Lie to is an exemplary instance of this ...”

“... and budget deficits unparalleled in British history. As it turned out, when Brown took over from Kenneth Clarke in 1997, the economy was on the mend, having shed the ERM, and the public accounts were already heading towards surplus. Further reflection, however, prompts the thought that, as a potential prime minister, Brown might have been better placed for ...”

“... marked ‘Kultur’ in one hand and a swooning, half-naked maiden in the other. The poster urged young Americans to ‘destroy this mad brute’.In wartime propaganda, as in the newly created ‘Western Civ’ surveys, civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of ...”

“... the idea of facing off an authentic and an assumed self towards the end of Leopoldstadt, when two young men face each other for the first time since Kristallnacht: one is ‘a writer of funny books’ who was taken to England as a child; the other is a mathematician whose family stayed in Vienna. For one, being Jewish has been crucial; for the other, it has ...”

“... When Kenneth Clark​ , then director of the National Gallery, arranged to visit the Barnes Foundation in the mid-1930s, he knew to be careful. Albert Barnes was famously tricky and belligerent. Furthermore, Clark and his wife, Jane, were staying with an arch-rival of Barnes’s, Joseph Widener, who was, as Clark puts it in his memoirs, ‘a collector of the old style, so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler ...”

“... no less than Thirties Rome, turns out to have been a place for sexual intrigue and abandon for young Manhattan women on holiday. Yet Wharton’s dissembling dowagers touched on something true about Americans’ changing perceptions and depictions of Rome. Out of these changes, and the persisting themes that attended them, William Vance has fashioned this ...”

“... cage of a new type that can be slipped between two combs in the brood chamber’) by a distressed young woman posing, rather pointlessly, as a local journalist. This fails to deceive Holmes for a moment – for has she not sent him a handwritten letter from a private address? – and the real occasion of her visit turns out to be anxiety over her ...”

“... Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 pages long. Depending on how the next volume pans out, the complete Life is going to be at least treble and possibly quadruple the size of your average biography of Auden, Eliot or Pound, and might even outdo the Bible, which was of course ...”

“... Ricketts were among the illustrators who often delighted and sometimes shocked public opinion; the young Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde among the best-known of the writers. And with the often splendid Yellow Book, first published in 1894, the firm achieved real notoriety and inspired innumerable parodies, comic verses and quips. Norman Gale, a long since ...”

“... of Health, spurred on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for ...”

“... country by Clinton’s attempt to draw a veil of secrecy over his unconsummated fumblings with a young woman who was not his wife. In the end, overkill underperformed. The impeachment ship went to pieces, flags flying, on the obstinate reef of public opinion. The country did not swallow, for instance, the Republicans’ outlandish claim that a President who ...”

“... short story ‘Absolution’, published in 1926 in his third short-story collection, All the Sad Young Men). The newly conceived novel would be a ‘consciously artistic achievement’, the product of ‘purely creative work – not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world’. In May he and the ...”

“... City in 1960, Grace Hartigan, then 38 years old, took the train uptown to visit Winston Price, a young scientist from Baltimore, and a new collector of her work. To anyone who saw her on the subway, she wouldn’t have looked like a painter; ‘when I go out,’ she said, ‘I’m all woman.’ Her work had just begun to sell, and to celebrate she had bought ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”