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“... the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were exquisites; the Beatles ...”

“... one of the other trustees, complained that even Keynes’s version was insufficiently sanitised. Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could ...”

“... opinions on how to subdue Utzon, and was confidentially advised by a government architect, Bill Wood, to use ‘chequebook control’ to stop Utzon’s monthly progress payments, without which he could not run his office. Davis then demanded that Utzon submit detailed drawings for the minister’s personal approval, to be let to public tender: the system ...”

“... upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His ...”

“... the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet ...”

“... under the table to run my fingertip over their convolutions. The table’s top is scrubbed white wood. The knots are like glass. I am comforted to think that next door at No. 58, our dog Rex is under the table, just like me. Peas flick from their pods into a white enamel colander, which has a thin rim of navy blue. The scent of inner peapod rises around ...”

“... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...”

“... quite close to popular images of Cavalier and Roundhead – existed in sheep-corn lowlands and wood-pasture uplands, based on distinct village and manorial patterns, and that it was these which shaped the geography of political choice in the Civil War. But his concern is with popular rather than élite allegiances, and his evidence, drawn from three ...”

“... blindly to power and authority’.This will not do. They were ‘ordinary men’ – the title of Christopher Browning’s indispensable book – who shot, day after day, at close range, men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The social psychology of the past three decades seems to belie the notion that a deviant personality is necessary to ...”

“... he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ...”

“... just coming into leaf. We go down the hill to Well to look at the towering pinnacle of fretted wood over the font, 1352 and the second oldest in England. Then on to Jervaulx, one of the few monastic ruins not run by the Department of National Heritage but by its country-house owners, for whom it must once have been like an elaborate folly. The ruins are ...”

“... he’d call it a night. A more congenial cruising ground, at least in milder weather, was along Christopher Street. I enjoyed sitting with him on the stoops and taking in the world while he was taking in the talent. One time we were sitting there, probably around midnight, and two straight guys walked by, probably Jersey boys, and muttered something about ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”