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“... transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and ...”

“... It was also valuable for its discussion of the origins of the domestic styles of Nesfield and Shaw, and for dealing at length with the work of George Devey, that recondite designer of genuine Jacobean houses for Liberal politicians. Dr Girouard has always wanted to combine social and architectural history, and rightly so, since the building of so many new ...”

“... allow for his personal reading temperament, his instinctive critical preferences and dislikes. John Banville roused my own antipathies as early as the second page of his novel: Kepler, arriving at a Bohemian castle, is greeted by a hump-backed dwarf who pipes, ‘God save you, gentles,’ and to make matters worse has second sight. When Tycho ...”

“... back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John Stokes is synchronic and aims to show how the arts were related to other aspects of the life of their own time, fixing on certain ‘topics and texts’ – the New Journalism, the New Art Criticism, the Music Hall, prisons, ‘the suicide craze’. The ...”

“... in a wholesale way only once. It was dressed in stucco when new, under the general direction of John Nash. It formed the central portion of his grand north-south route from Regent’s Park to Carlton House (demolished in 1827, only a year after the building work in Regent Street was complete). The Victorians made inroads on Nash’s scheme; the Quadrant ...”

“... Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and overshadowed by its villains. Disraeli’s novels glorified Nathan and Lionel de Rothschild as the ...”

“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... scarcity of material.’ In a section somewhat dutifully titled ‘Defying Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher ...”

“... Enola as part athlete, part scholar, part judo expert, and entire rebel. (One of her set texts was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.) However, 16 years were enough, and Mrs Holmes has taken off to start a new life. She might have told her daughter what she was doing – but she didn’t. Her brothers don’t recognise Enola at the station; they ...”

“... reasonably enough, felt personally attacked by) were people who did not like his work. Shaw (who disliked the bust Epstein made of him, although he had defended the Christ) and Henry Moore (who, as a young man, had been generously treated by Epstein, but stood in the way of a London site being found for Ecce Homo) were both less than wholeheartedly ...”

“... of admission’ was pretty much Coward’s verdict on the playwrights who emerged in the wake of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Wesker included), and largely their verdict on him. And despite a revival of interest in his early work during the Sixties (‘Dad’s renaissance’, he called it), Coward has been regarded since 1956 as being on the losing ...”

“... leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs of drying up: Irish writers, whether resident in England or Ireland, remain a considerable presence on the London stage. Of course, Irish ...”

“... Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building sites on their beats. Policemen don’t only look younger these ...”

“... partridge-shooting country gent with intellectual tastes (‘a fathead and voluptuary’ Bernard Shaw called him in 1920 after he had blundered into some literary debate) with whom she remained on excellent terms after they had ceased to live together. Clive had plenty of affairs of his own, but was in his way a family man and a source of ...”