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“... and spent lavishly in a fully public manner. They were adaptable, even amphibious (to use Sir Lewis Namier’s phrase), moving easily between town and country, centre and periphery. Potential rivals were de-fanged, seduced, by a policy of relative social acceptance. New fortunes were allowed a share of political power. Newcomers were admitted into the ...”

“... reclaim the African and Asian colonies lost after the Great War, he was silenced by the historian Lewis Namier with the words: ‘Wir Juden und die anderen Farbigen denken anders.’ Some Zionists tried to persuade themselves that they counted among Namier’s ‘other coloured peoples’, or even that Zionism was an anti-colonial movement. The indefatigable ...”

“... The verdicts that these massive works provoked were often scorching. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Gladstone’s successor as chancellor of the exchequer and a formidable classical scholar, said that he was ‘fundamentally wrong’ about Homer. Tennyson thought his opinions on Homeric religion ‘hobbyhorsical’. Huxley denounced Gladstone’s ...”

“... as on the outdoor man.’ Sickert enjoyed making pronouncements – his most recent biographer, Matthew Sturgis, calls him ‘a man of strong opinions loosely held’ – and this one should be treated with some scepticism. A more significant factor keeping Sickert indoors was his temperament. A bit-part actor in his early youth, he practised a theatrical ...”

“... the Journal suggest Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, which have been said by Rupert Brooke and C.S. Lewis to be about beetles. ‘It is always easier to obey if you dare not disobey. German women are to their lords like so many black beetles’: John Butler Yeats (father of the poet and of the painter Jack B. Yeats) was aware that people had a propensity to see ...”

“... of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some 16th-century Lord Butler justifying his master much as Tebbit and Bell are doing this evening. ‘It was unfortunate, of ...”

“... patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all Sons of Man, if not of David in particular. Matthew starts with Abraham and arranges the ancestors in three neat groups: fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon; fourteen from the exile to the Christ. The two gospels are in concordance between Abraham and ...”

“... multiplicity may turn out to be a trickier sort of virtue than it might seem. ‘Browning,’ Matthew Arnold told his friend Clough, ‘is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness,’ apparently unwilling or unable to understand that one ‘must begin with an Idea of the world ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”

“... anti-apartheid activists from the Eastern Cape known as the Cradock Four: his father, Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli. The men were tortured by blowtorch, and stabbed multiple times. The fingers on Fort Calata’s left hand were severed; on one severed finger was his wife’s wedding band, which she had removed because her fingers ...”

“... an ideal and a reality, as Greville and Sidney well knew, the distance may be large. When C.S. Lewis, in the Oxford History of English Literature, called Sidney ‘that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’, he provided unwitting testimony to the success of Greville’s legend. It is only recently that the gap ...”

“... his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of demolition. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1928, he cited what he called ‘the literary afterthoughts of Edmund Burke and the latter-day Whigs’ as an example of the sort of source ...”

“... such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of ...”

“... Portrait of Innocent X. The reviews managed to express both revulsion and excitement, and Wyndham Lewis made serious claims:Of the younger painters, none actually paints so beautifully as Francis Bacon … I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures – the shouting creatures in glass cases, these dissolving ganglia the size of a small fist in which ...”