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“... like home.’ As age succeeds to age one kind of inconvenience gives way to another, from smoky Norman halls to the stark artistic interiors of the ‘First Russian Ballet Period’. Meanwhile in the ‘Ordinary Cottage’ a comfortable soul, with her kettle on the hob and a reproduction of The Monarch of the Glen on the wall, sits in an armchair reading ...”

“... but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed – ‘Street, Norman Shaw, a volume of topography articles, an Approach to Victorian Architecture, the next volume of memoirs’ – none was forthcoming. ‘William Hickey’ in the Daily Express foresaw Betjeman’s likely role as poet laureate and commissioned him to write ...”

“... one exemplary indication of the pressures that he was likely to encounter under constant exposure. Norman Tebbit – even then adept at formulating the relevant test to apply and the right euphemism in which to cloak it – had already said that what Joseph lacked was ‘that indefinable quality that makes a national political leader’. In short, the whole ...”

“... made much of an effort to rescue him from the appearance of failure. Although few went as far as Norman Fruman in condemning Coleridge as an impotent fraud and plagiarist, many reluctantly agreed with Thomas McFarland when he declared: ‘Coleridge’s ruin, in both life and work, is ... the true human fact; the academic classic and the conventional ...”

“... at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not ...”

“... it is worse than that. They all knew what they ought to do. They kept on spelling it out, in every White Paper and Cabinet minute. But they could never face doing it. In 1951, 20 per cent of all public expenditure and nearly 8 per cent of GDP went on defence. The incoming Tory foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, back in his old post, told the Cabinet in June 1952 ...”

“... off her stays by the water’s edge and never wore them again’, and was remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of ...”

“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... spoiled darling left behind in the Home Counties’. But his most furious barbs are reserved for Norman Podhoretz, the reactionary editor of Commentary. Hitchens seems almost obsessed by him, returning to the attack over and over again. It is a curious fact that Podhoretz, an immodest man who has much about which to be modest, so got under the skin of ...”

“... of American art of the 20th century, to co-curate the present exhibition with the old firm of Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachimides. After three meetings – which were very enjoyable though they threatened squalls ahead – and some subsequent interchanges with Rosenthal, I realised that I had to resign rather than go on taking up a great deal of ...”

“... in jail and in imminent danger of execution. When they emerged from prison, he was prematurely white-haired, and she was a semi-invalid who would be remembered as ‘capricious impatient, wasteful, a victim of recurring migraines, and afflicted with a profound, constant melancholy’. For the next thirty years, Hervé was engaged in repairing the damage ...”

“... would have found the goings-on particularly funny, although he might well have found them stylish. Norman Hartnell designed some very pretty dresses for The Bedder’s Opera in 1922. There are illustrations to show what he looked like wearing them. He was particularly seductive in an off-the-shoulder number with roses appliquéd at the bustline and scattered ...”

“... next thing he did was strangle him with an old tie (after making sure his dog, Bleep, a black and white mongrel bitch, was out of the way). He washed the body and dusted it with talcum powder, then he went back to bed, where he spent the night with Bleep and the corpse. Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me. How can ...”

“... dispelled by recovering its sources and trying to turn their potency to benign ends. Like any good white magician, Syberberg insists that rationalist denials of evil can only end in specious evasion. Hence his bold use of Wagner throughout, not so much to point a historical lesson as to invade and numb the senses. We are encouraged to let ourselves become ...”

“... words of the book’s last page: ‘Through his father – who knew nothing of Gorteen, Duntally, Norman towers, and lonely headlands – the uncanny facial resemblance, the poetry, the wild blood had been transferred across the Atlantic Ocean to this cold winter land, to this, his father’s harsh native city in which he now lay dying. He looked at his ...”