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“... and applied it in his fictional character descriptions. Sterne, on the other hand, arranged that Walter Shandy’s forthright declaration that ‘there are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the ...”

“... media eminences, which, according to a list released by the revolutionaries in 1979, included Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Mrs Arthur Sulzberger. Emboldened by this support, the previously timid shah manifested signs of the syndrome al-Afghani had identified in one of his predecessors: ‘However ...”

“... what Waterloo looked like. Battlefield tourism had begun while the corpses were still fresh. Sir Walter Scott was one of many who picked his way through the mud in the midsummer of 1815, taking home a sword here, a captured flag there, and later assembling a grisly collection of skulls and other relics at Abbotsford. Byron, Southey and Wordsworth all ...”

“... The party was in an apartment on West 67th Street, in the Hotel des Artistes, the building where Barbara and Jason Epstein along with Elizabeth Hardwick founded the New York Review of Books. Jason Epstein liked to let it be known that Robert Silvers wasn’t at the supper when the idea for the review was hatched. But Silvers would say that even if he ...”

“... us how to put time together again. The aesthete she conjures up is at best the contemporary of Walter Pater. I would have thought that Proust’s claim on us now was something like the opposite: the depth of his sense of historical haunting, his feeling for the saturation of human life in time, wrinkles, ageing, shortness of breath. Redemption through art ...”

“... preclude taking plenty of other young married women out for special ‘drives’. One of them, Barbara Maclaren, returned from a seaside drive with the prime minister red in the face and crying. When a friend asked what had happened in the car, she wrote that he had ‘my head jammed down on to his shoulder and all his fingers in my mouth’. Was this the ...”

“... close to the surface of ordinary life. Fred MacMurray, as the insurance man who conspires with Barbara Stanwyck to murder her husband and collect on his life policy, makes all kinds of noises about being a seducer and being seduced, and the movie does everything it can to create a dusty, sultry aura of sex around the crime. All to no avail. The only ...”

“... his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social circle that was soon dominated by painters. In 1951 and again from 1955 until his death, O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became a curator of exhibitions and a well known figure in the New York art ...”

“... his Hollywood hustle as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who ...”

“... we may feel, cannot be far from the Epiphany. And, in fact, for some decades now (from Walter Allen to David Lodge) critics have found it worth while to see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ in terms of the new movement of Modernism. Certainly it does no harm to recall that Kipling’s story was written nearly two decades before the so much more apparently modern ...”

“... nicely illustrated, full of telling statistics and shot through with the vivid recollections of Barbara Cartland, Duff Cooper and other unconventional ‘native informants’, it attempts to drive a stake through the heart of the Orwellian orthodoxy once and for all. The account begins, appropriately, with the much less catastrophic story historians now ...”

“... a nerve among medievalists. More than thirty years ago, pioneering work by Shulamith Shahar and Barbara Hanawalt showed conclusively that Ariès was wrong. Not only did medieval people have a concept of childhood, adapting the sequential model of the ‘Ages of Man’ from classical antiquity, but they loved their children and mourned them when they died. A ...”

“... women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of refugees out of France across the Pyrenees ...”

“... were less impressive. The most vitriolic diatribes come from Melitta Schmideberg and her husband Walter. Melitta, in particular, repeatedly exacerbates tensions by comparing her Kleinian opponents to the Nazis. Dismayed, Payne hears in these quarrels ‘a tiny reverberation of the massive conflict which pervades the world’ and Brierley aims ‘not merely ...”

“... Shockers in their own day, Owen, Blunden and the rest were canonical, now. It is to them that Barbara looks, in Put out more flags, when she wants a model for what she imagines will be the wartime role of her feckless brother Basil Seal: ‘She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern ...”