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“... of a fairer Scotland and UK have been created; if those are implemented, all of us will have won. Gavin Francis On​ the evening of Friday, 19 September, hundreds of loyalists congregated in George Square in Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence ...”

“... was a moving force behind the National Trust’s new Country House Scheme, recommending James Lees-Milne for the job of historic buildings secretary and also helping to define the aesthetic which would be built up around the preserved country house. In English Country Houses (1941) she started to theorise the English country house in terms that ...”

“... her labour lasted ‘about 65 hours’ and she was left ‘badly torn’. They called the baby Gavin after Gavin Douglas, the Scottish medieval poet and translator of the Aeneid, but neither of them was suited to parenting. Willa’s relationship with her own mother was difficult and she avoided contact with her ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... of the theorist André Bazin. British film studies were still in utero. Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert didn’t start the student magazine Sequence till a year after Great Expectations appeared. Anderson, it goes without saying, despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of London in his novel Rotting Hill (1951): ‘a ...”

“... Goethe’s friend, Alois Hirt, on artists in Rome in 1787 might have been quoted, notably those on Gavin Hamilton. Among the travellers recorded in the Dictionary are 310 artists – painters, sculptors, architects, gem-carvers and engravers – from the Adam brothers to Wright of Derby. In Britain as elsewhere in Northern Europe and, indeed, in the states of ...”

“... the first rules is never to offer anything for free. In the New Statesman’s Weekend Competition Gavin Ewart once mistakenly implied that the actor Roland Culver was dead. Mr Culver – whose name had only come up in the first place because it rhymed with ‘vulva’ – threatened to sue for potential loss of earnings. Page refused to let the Weekend ...”

“... a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers to whom the ...”

“... for which only 400 invitations were sent out. Mrs Astor found it convenient to take it (as Henry James would have said) from McAllister that great wealth could be a substitute for blue blood: it may have flowed in the veins of some of the 400, but the rest were instant aristocrats. What were the values of this new aristocracy, which, in the case of the ...”

“... to George Galloway in Rochdale, the politics of place are as central here as party politics.I met Gavin Grimshaw, six foot four, lean and sunburned in a Lonsdale boxing vest, in the simply furnished two-storey terraced house in Bury where he currently lives. The door opens straight onto the narrow pavement; part of the street is the original red brick, part ...”

“... Ice-Cream, which he described as his most autobiographical novel, Moore dramatised the gap between Gavin’s idealism (and failure to study for exams) in the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father ...”

“... editing the one with a strong authorial hand and appearing twice in the other in the company of James Fenton. To be a love poet is a matter of tone, then, not of personality. The men in John Whitworth’s book ‘go in like whippets’ ‘for fearsome thrashes’ and ‘noholds barred’ – phrases from a single Kingsley Amis poem – and the vocabulary ...”

“... vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world, 75 feet wide and 110 feet high’ (according to Gavin Young’s book, Iraq: Land of Two Rivers). Beneath this arch, the Roman Emperor Caracalla, himself part-Syrian, once invited the Parthian princes to a feast and then killed them all; another ugly tale about Caracalla is that he dug up, not far away, the ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”

“... Antiquarian prejudice and ecclesiastical philistinism are in good shape, self-righteous as ever.Gavin Stamp was not of the flock. He was a propagandist, a preservationist, a stern critic and fierce journalist. He was a great historian – evident in his Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006) – as well as a great architectural historian. No one else ...”