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“... her two sons, lively and talented in their teens, dwindled into charmless wastrels. A.C. Benson, who was at school with them, charted the decline of Cyril Oliphant from a ‘vivid and sparkling Eton-boy’ to an ‘elderly and deprecating loafer’; his younger brother was experienced by visitors as ‘a mysterious weight’. Both of them remained ...”

“... many of his contemporaries (whom Pearce fails to quote) found him exasperating. One thinks of A.C. Benson, who regarded Heretics as ‘inflated, flashy stuff’ (‘flashy’ is just the right word) and was less than impressed when GKC came to dine in Cambridge: ‘Chesterton sweated so that when he shook hands and held his cigar downwards, the sweat ran down ...”

“... On a cycling holiday in Scotland A.C. Benson went to meet Arthur Balfour at Whittingehame. The prime minister was out practising on his private golf course. They saw him ‘approaching across the grass, swinging a golf club – in rough coat and waistcoat, the latter open; a cloth cap, flannel trousers; and large black boots, much too heavy and big for his willowy figure ...”

“... Above all they like feeling they own you – or that you own them – a thing I hate.’ A.C. Benson, whose medal Larkin was later to receive from the Royal Society of Literature, put it more succinctly, quoting (I think) Aristophanes: ‘Don’t make your house in my mind.’ Though with Larkin it was ‘Don’t make your house in my house either,’ his ...”