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“... no doubt consider themselves liberated, and their negative and destructive attitude towards books, Dorothy Butler’s Babies need books comes as marvellous relief. Her theme is that nobody is too young for books, that parents can create a close relationship with their babies from the start of their lives, and lay the foundations of lasting delight. She ...”

“... are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in politics. He despised Rab Butler for not having fought (he had a withered hand after a riding accident as a child), he sneered at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a ...”

“... good Tory’ clearly meant different things to biographer and subject. Macmillan’s rival, Rab Butler, chose a biographer from outside his own party, but his and Anthony Howard’s political outlooks may have been closer to each other than Mr Horne’s and Macmillan’s ‘not very good’ Toryisms. After an undistinguished three years at Eton, a first in ...”

“... despite the aftermath of a major operation, was determined at almost all costs to prevent Mr R.A. Butler succeeding him. His illness would have given him every excuse to resign at once and proffer no advice to the Queen at all on such a matter. Constitutionally, he was not obliged to give it, and Bonar Law declined to do so in somewhat similar circumstances ...”

“... an unprecedented achievement. In his exciting but frustrating book on early Modernism, Christopher Butler discusses the Delaunay-Cendrars work in some detail, with-in the context of simultaneism, but does not mention either Duncan Grant or Vanessa Bell at any point (although her husband Clive, a critic rather than an artist, is respectfully discussed). ...”

“... tabloid columnist. Roddy the heartless art-dealing seducer, Henry the free-market ideologue, Dorothy the profit-mad agriculturalist. As a dynasty, however, these men and women belong to another literary and temporal mode entirely – to the spoof Gothic fiction of Winshaw Towers, with its cartoon-like turrets and corridors, its drunken ...”

“... the chief concern of his life.’ On the following page Mr Ffinch tells of being admitted by Miss Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s literary executor, to archival material so rich that he ‘remained happily stranded in the attic for twelve hours a day for several weeks’. ‘As each chest, trunk, suitcase or box revealed its treasures in the form of ...”

“... in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.’ Similarly, the determination of the guardsmen to block Rab Butler from becoming prime minister can only be understood in the context of their response to appeasement – Butler had even sought a separate peace in 1940. Crookshank had been accepted by the Foreign Office in 1919 while ...”

“... gay alcoholics and sexual decadence. Some of the details of Susan’s daily life are borrowed from Dorothy Parker’s Diary of a New York Lady, written in the Forties and subtitled ‘During Days of Horror, Despair and World Change’. Parker’s empty-headed, self-centred diarist has a marriage on the rocks (‘Joe left word with the ...”

“... as her daughter-in-law’s helpmeet. What could be more idyllic? Quite a lot, it seems. Lady Dorothy, being a Cavendish, made no secret of her loathing for the old lady or of her fast-diminishing marital passion. ‘Harold was not enthusiastic about the grapplings and gropings of the bed,’ Davenport-Hines assures us. Maybe not: but Harold’s friend ...”

“... a private income, and a knowledge of Italian and Latin. She was a regular visitor to her friend Dorothy Shakespear at her London flat after she married Ezra Pound in 1914; her relationship with the Pounds increased the breadth of her reading as well as offering her, and indeed her mother, an example of how someone with her unusual mixture of ...”

“... violent and not very plausible quarrel which is conveniently witnessed by a vastly stereotypic butler. Dermot goes on to a dance; returns at a late hour to his own flat; finds that a revolver has been planted among his handkerchiefs and hard upon this learns that his uncle has been murdered. And so on: it is all simple and absurd – but meanwhile we have ...”

“... were forbidden the use of the carpeted main staircase; Williams’s boss, Humphrey Milford, had a butler who served drinks on a silver salver. His lyrics found an enthusiastic supporter in Alice Meynell, the Catholic versifier, critic and protector of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis ...”

“... Here he was able to take advantage of work already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James ...”

“... cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ‘frilly blouse ...”