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“... and around the entire oeuvre, ‘a hallucinatory, Art Nouveau life-form’, in the words of Terry Castle, proliferates ‘new vinous shoots, brusque outgrowths and curling tendrils for more than five decades’.Colette seems barely to have noticed when her mother died in 1912. But she returned to ‘the presence of her who, instead of receding far ...”

“... with Ann Radcliffe playing Kathy Acker; but the analogy is suggestive. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is convincingly read here as high camp. But there are important differences, too. Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; Post-Modern horror belongs to an ...”

“... Dracula is that most Irish of villains, an absentee landlord, who leaves his Transylvanian castle to buy up property in London. Like the Protestant Irish, he combines weirdness with a dash of hard-headed realism. Dracula is a material ghoul, much preoccupied with leases and title deeds. When he is slashed with a knife banknotes, not blood, spill from ...”

“... me then, as did the fact that the Temple of Claudius (ad 54-ish) lay directly below the Norman castle, one of the least known and most evocative archaeological sites in England. Since the early 1960s, Colchester has gathered many more attributes, becoming a university town (of the ‘plate glass’ generation) and currently building its own international ...”

“... soused them, is told in Cohen’s marvellous All We Know: Three Lives (2012), through which, as Terry Castle noted, Bedford flutters, ‘a benign sapphic putto’.Bedford too came from money, and although she seldom had much of it (her trust fund was confiscated by the Nazis after she published ‘one outspoken aggressive paragraph’ in Klaus Mann’s ...”

“... an emblem of innocence and international understanding, but looking more like a remnant from a Terry Gilliam animation. Around 1970, Immendorff severed his links with Beuysian mysticism entirely and adopted Maoism as his guiding ideology. He began making crudely propagandistic paintings, artful as political posters, but artless as art. A crudely painted ...”

“... letters, however, that he was out of his social depth: he did, after all, spend his childhood in a castle in County Kilkenny. After Berkeley returned to Ireland he spent a fair amount of time seeking preferment. He landed the deanship of Derry and later became bishop of Cloyne. For a man who didn’t believe in matter, he had a remarkably keen eye to his own ...”

“... servant, is an Ascendancy sort of ghoul, wistfully poring over maps of London in his mouldering castle and finally deprived, like the Irish landlords, of his life-sustaining soil. The crazed precision of magic and occultism, beliefs which are systematic rather than nebulous, could provide Irish Protestants with a substitute for Catholic doctrine and ...”

“... is a host of psychically challenged families in classical Irish fiction, from Tristram Shandy and Castle Rackrent to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, yet the concerns of these works range far beyond the domestic. The novel is the most capacious, anarchic of literary genres, which makes these self-imposed restrictions all the more of a pity. It is not a question of ...”

“... Edinburgh. It sports a George Street, a Hanover Street and an Albany Street, as well as a Castle Street (without the castle) and a Princes Street (with no prince); even in the 1960s, the statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the main street was surrounded by Highland dancers every Friday night. The Scottishness of ...”

“... it will feel very much like being shipwrecked on the Tempest island of the Elephant and Castle; another chunk of London real estate serially overwhelmed by enlightened development. Reaching the end of my biblical allocation of years brought on something more troubling than Nick Cave’s midlife mirror interrogation, his 20,000 Days on ...”

“... and engaging but ramshackle novel (comparable, according to its author, to a ruined fortress or castle) is in three parts. First we see the period of native rebellion which followed Napoleon’s attempt to bring Haiti into the French Empire. The cayman, a fearsome adjunct to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s guerrilla army, swallows and then generously ...”

“... in which fact and fiction easily interbreed. Connolly’s Citizen Army staged an assault on Dublin Castle one foggy night without being sure whether the operation was real or simulated. The labour leader James Larkin was smuggled into a Dublin hotel disguised in a count’s cloak and false beard, while Maud Gonne, who had played an old crone in Yeats’s play ...”

“... retrieved him from the Dominicans and placed him under house arrest for a year in the family castle. With touching fraternal solicitude, they also tried to subvert his decision to become a friar by sending a naked prostitute into his room, not the most effective tactic for a man who declared contemplation the greatest of all pleasures. Thomas finally got ...”

“... but was not allowed to manage his fortune, household and vast estates, which included a Norman castle and close to 13,000 acres of land in Wexford. Instead, his formidable mother, Urania, ran his affairs, while Portsmouth himself, one of the wealthiest landowners in England, was provided with what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect ...”