“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... his effete literary efforts. The movie – inspired in part by Edward Albee’s Seascape and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and broken up by short quotes from Dostoevsky – has some stilted, uneven fun at the expense of one man’s writerly ambition, but doesn’t question the ambition itself. If anything, writing seems to represent for Franco an ...”

“... the affection in which it is held by the architectural great and good’. Richard Rogers compared Robin Hood Gardens to a Nash terrace and claimed it was ‘one of the most outstanding social housing buildings in Britain’. Zaha Hadid said it was her favourite piece of architecture in London. Boughton prefers Kate Mackintosh’s ...”

“... Peterloo, framed by a Radical conspiracy devised by Hunt, Samuel Bamford and the newspaper editor Richard Carlile, a ‘free-thinker’. The TLS published an acerbic review of Walmsley’s book whose anonymous author was later revealed to be E.P. Thompson. In The Making of the English Working Class, the second edition of ...”

“... whom he had few nice things to say, and his impressionable, mentally unstable younger brother, Richard, about whom Parker has turned up new material – much of which also makes one think badly of Isherwood. With his family disowned, he formed what would be his longest – and wholly asexual – friendship at Repton, with Edward Upward. Close and ...”

“... men in the country’. He graduated ‘magna cum laude in Literature especially Greek and English’ after taking courses which included some comparative literature and Grandgent’s course on Dante. Even then, ‘Harvard had a long tradition of emphasis on writing, especially creative writing,’ and students ‘were encouraged to write verse and ...”

“... in rows and the lectures were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or so later, she ...”

“... are misogynistic.After the end of the war, Pamela moved to Paris, where she deployed her English aristocratic manners and Churchill surname in the pursuit of wealthy Europeans. She juggled Élie de Rothschild, Prince Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos and Gianni Agnelli, the Italian powerbroker and Fiat boss. She was ostracised by many women, allies of the ...”

“... in science, having been born in Galton’s aristocratic notions of the natural worthiness of the English upper class, taken to its evil extreme by Nazi eugenicists, and too readily used by American scientists to rationalise racial injustice.’ Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, had explicitly raised the question of nature v. nurture with reference to ...”

“... reports. Garton Ash identifies the informers – someone at the Humboldt University, a lecturer in English literature, a British national who took the code-name ‘Smith’. The most interesting is ‘Michaela’, who worked in a state art-dealer’s and reported for years on subordinates, acquaintances, friends, even her daughter’s boyfriend – out of a ...”

“... absurdly cumbersome, and seems to have been, if not the originator, then the promulgator of pidgin English: when his interpreter admitted there was nothing the Chinese could do about their dishonesty since it was innate, Anson transcribed this in A Voyage around the World as ‘Chinese man very great rogue truly, but have fashion, no can help.’ Still, they ...”

“... stalk. Now shoot him just at the base of the left ear for kindness.’ The macaronics cross Saxon English with Berlitz Swahili: ‘Keiti says you mganga with the lion.’ And the once effective sententiae sound like Poor Richard staring into the bottom of the glass: ‘Everybody does other people harm’; ‘Nothing is as ...”

“... although he knew the shortages of wartime entailed forbearance (there was the example of the dowdy English princesses whose various uniforms looked as if they had been made from blankets), new clothes gave him a heart-pumping thrill. He may have been hard up, but he wanted several cashmere sweaters, a dark blue jacket and a pair of saddle shoes. Late one night ...”

“... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...”