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“... the arts in modern times, and of Modernism itself. When these are combined with an early death – Lawrence is a further case in point – a powerful spell is cast.To care about Lennon, it is not necessary to have cared very deeply about the Beatles as flower-children, or to have warmed to their friendship with the Maharishi – there could never have been any ...”

“... in Androcles and another of the Evelyn Waugh family warily grouped at their garden gate. Gertrude Lawrence is pictured twice, once in her own right, once with Coward. The trawl is wide: statesmen, benefactors, cricketers, spymasters, captains of industry, band leaders, bishops, kings, a flower arranger, a golf writer, the pioneer of mother-craft, the editors ...”

“... educational advantage and career opportunities over the past century and a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; Anne was a ...”

“... idea that the young men in her son’s life were other than just ‘dear friends’. Yet Anthony Powell, who worked with him in the early days, writing scripts at Teddington Studios for ‘quota quickies’, reports in his memoirs that Rattigan ‘never made any particular secret of his homosexuality’ no matter whom he was talking to. The relationship in ...”

“... room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three films by Nicolas Roeg and four by Powell and Pressburger, with A Matter of Life and Death sharing 13th place with Les Enfants du paradis and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp sharing 23rd place with Some Like It Hot and Taxi Driver. Part of the blame for the oddity of the Time Out poll can ...”

“... the chronology won’t fit. Death comes for the Archbishop, though it is remembered by an Anthony Powell character only as the name of a lethal cocktail, is the title of a frail and delicate masterpiece by Willa Cather, that much underrated writer, which more than fifty years ago delineated the shape that North American civilisation would assume in the mind ...”

“... He’s not a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of ...”

“... Moreau’s interests,’ Kerr added, ‘are all subjects, worldwide.’ Another hint came in Colin Powell’s 1995 autobiography – he was military aide to the secretary of defence, Caspar Weinberger, at the time of the Grenada invasion. Powell wrote that Moreau came to me one morning with an odd revelation. The ...”

“... which is why the Science Fiction of galactic empires is such a typically American form. Since D.H. Lawrence and the rise of Hollywood we have been accustomed to think of the successful mythologisers as passionate pilgrims in reverse, travelling not from America to Europe but from the East Coast towards the South-West. Such a movement, which takes place in all ...”

“... 1880 we pass into the company of a third group whose most prominent figures include Shaw, Wells, Lawrence and Russell. They form, Cowling explains, a second generation of anti-Christian humanists more pessimistic than the first, because more conscious of the persistence of savage and irrational elements in society. Finally Cowling reviews the leading figures ...”

“... supports this view of Turner’s genius. John Gage ends his introduction with a remark made by Lawrence Gowing in 1966: ‘It is not certain that we are yet prepared to see Turner whole.’ Gage reckons it is time to renew the attempt. He uses another quotation from Gowing to epitomise the Modernist view of Turner – as a painter who transcended ...”

“... good reading, which explains why certain people will always think Evelyn Waugh a genius and D.H. Lawrence a bore. For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even Wilde would appear strained next to ...”

“... who is interested in anything at all should fail to read this book’ – of Liddell Hart’s T.E. Lawrence); and nicely cheeky (of Churchill, ‘The old humbug can write’; Baden Powell, ‘nice old gentleman as he must be, is a ... Happiness-addict’). Within a short time he’d mastered all the tricks of the ...”

“... The tired phrases playback in loops of hate. Once they were given an apocalyptic spin by Enoch Powell, and now they are smoothed by the in-flight rhetoric of hatchet-headed Essex men. The original keyholders of these terraces parroted the same sentiments, word for word, before decamping to the fringes of Epping Forest. An incoming tide of ...”

“... he despised parliamentary politics. After all, the generation before his – Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot – despised democracy. Nor was Catholicism the mark of a deviant at a time when Belloc urged with some success that it was fashionable to convert to Rome. What made Waugh a deviant was not that he became a Catholic but that ...”