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“... to cover his armchairs.Worboys describes the ‘Canine Castle’, the dog-dealing emporium of Bill George, a ‘nobby West End butcher’ (‘nobby’ was London slang for those with social pretensions), who was known as the ‘Father of the Fancy’. The Fancy was a loose fraternity of working-class men with a passion for pub-based blood sports. (Charles ...”

“... poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long ...”

“... go … if those millions went – not just the house in the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the George V in Paris, the account at Asprey’s in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future. Glass spends his happiest moments with his mistress, Alison, a young Irish ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a moment when the British were much preoccupied with reconsidering their past. In particular, in the wake of Catholic emancipation and with the Oxford ...”

“... because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t understand.’) H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan subsidised their succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard ...”

“... all excited by the fact that Mary was being made love to at the time in peculiar ways by a young painter called Kenneth Callahan (her own technical defloration had occurred a couple of years earlier) and was also involved, though not seriously, with a green-eyed lesbian of 35 called Czerna Wilson, who wore her bronze hair in a pigtail that reached her ...”

“... been led to expect insights a little sharper than those on show here. This story of Margery and George Ince, living in Rome, where George is employed by some sort of multinational philanthropic and acronymic organisation, falls into the same painless slot as Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred. The story turns on the ...”

“... laugh. I heard later that the two had become buddies and worked together in some way. Perhaps the painter got the chauffeur’s job. While writing this diary I’m thinking about conversation, real and reported, the talk of the young and the old. Art education has hardly anything to do with reading books and being able to write, these silent activities. The ...”

“... In 1911, George Santayana gave an address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California in which he sought to identify and define what he called, in his lecture title, ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’. Santayana had a bracing view of what it was ‘to possess a living philosophy’ (‘to have a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human destiny’), and in this talk, he outlined a schematic division, or opposition, in American philosophy, or ‘mentality’, which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis ...”

“... timelessness that makes them oddly available to the poet. In another monologue here, Thwaite makes George Dennis, Consul at Benghazi and a passionate antiquarian, open with words that form a splendidly resonant though decorous conceit for the poetic process itself: Rich bronzes, figured vases, jewellery – Fruits of my labours, subterranean joys: My men sit ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... Nothing precise has come to light about Bampfylde’s ‘debauchery’. His friend George Huddesford, who must have known everything about these London years, chose to enter the conspiracy of silence maintained by virtually everyone who encountered Bampfylde. Another Wykehamist, Huddesford had been briefly a fellow of New ...”

“... them seems to have broken off relations completely. A ‘very hard’ letter from her ‘dearest George’ was awaiting her in ‘a great packet’ when the couple reached Orléans, but friendlier exchanges eventually followed. Included in that first dreaded packet – her ‘death warrant’ as she called it – was a letter from Mr Barrett himself. But ...”

“... art: they called themselves ‘The Ancients’, among whom the most gifted, besides Palmer, were George Richmond and Edward Calvert. Shoreham for the Ancients functioned as, in Henry James’s phrase, ‘the Great Good Place’ – ‘a valley so hidden,’ Calvert said, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out.’ The Shoreham spirit that ...”