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“... unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to ...”

“... my Academy with gunmen?” ’ By 1940, O’Malley was closely involved with the circle round the Bell, the Irish journal founded by Sean O’Faolain with the old Republican and Communist Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam ...”

“... cast of characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann (former Communist, rabid anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover ...”

“... substance muttering to a dead animal sat down next to them on the Tube or rang their front-door bell? Among the new stars and saints to have emerged since the death of Beuys and Warhol is Jeff Koons. He is said to have been a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my ...”

“... so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates chosen for their cheapness (‘One was a pederast, another was a lunatic, a third was an alcoholic’), and became the oldest beneficed clergyman in ...”

“... his ‘credo’ and paused to pat, with pensive benevolence, a sculpture of a mother and child by Henry Moore is truly alarming. Stourton doesn’t conceal the loathing Alan expressed for his father in his diaries. But how to explain it? Perhaps it is as mysterious as the true motives of this avowed enemy of political correctness, whose confessions have done ...”

“... the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal castle evolved into a stately home fit for royalty, said to be ‘the greatest of any subject’s house in England’. Its nickname, Loyalty House – after the marquess of Winchester’s motto ...”

“... persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out: ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke, and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known ...”

“... Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a ...”

“... Tonight it’s memories of Mrs Thatcher and a real feast of humbug with Lords Butler, Tebbit and Bell joining in a chorus 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 ...”

“... reliefs reached the Louvre, they caused an international sensation. The British diplomat Austen Henry Layard began excavations in Nimrud (the ancient capital Kalhu) in 1845 and worked there and at Nineveh until 1851, sending back to the British Museum numerous reliefs and other objects. Financed only in part by the BM, Layard repaid private investors with ...”

“... fruits, and hot pies, gingerbread and potatoes. In this respect, Scharf made pre-illustrations for Henry Mayhew’s celebrated investigations of the London street trades. No matter that Mayhew was also a pioneer sociologist: both he and Scharf were journalists at heart, men of insatiable curiosity about how people lived and worked. The big difference was that ...”

“... have been quite so vehement in more relaxed conditions? Would he, for instance, have included Henry Green’s Party Going in his 99 if this ‘carefully wrought poem’ had been favoured by the BMC? Probably not. Thus, Kingsley Amis’s Anti-Death League more or less has to be preferred to Take a girl like you, Iris Murdoch’s The ...”

“... still presumably expected to be greeted by a peal on the abbey bells and qualified for a passing bell if things went ill. Horace Walpole said: ‘The English are like ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.’ That was in 1790. The English were about to undergo a collective change in behaviour: the waters to which they would increasingly waddle were ...”

“... men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their families often stayed on, the lofty ...”