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“... and his four young children, two of them by Lady Elizabeth, whose company Georgiana ‘for reasons best known to herself ... loved more than that of any living soul’. Georgiana’s mother, Countess Spencer, was also in the group, for the Devonshire Set was nothing if not close-knit. On the eve of the accouchement Lady Elizabeth very prudently displayed her ...”

“... the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must not be allowed to become a chef d’oeuvre inconnu’. Now it will not, though Waywiser is a very small publisher without the marketing or distribution clout of the many larger, mainstream firms ...”

“... enterprises has, for the last 11 years, been taking shape more or less under cover of secrecy. Nicholas Mosley’s Catastrophe Practice, published in 1979, was the first of a series of five highly intelligent novels, ostensibly concerned with the shifting relationships of a small group of characters, and linked less by narrative than by a patchwork of ...”

“... acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he draws upon the work of others, but he is at his best when his arguments are based upon his own research and thinking. Foster is also clearly more at home with high politics and high society than with the lives of the poor, and there is a marked contrast between the easy confidence that characterisies his ...”

“... interested in the history of opera or cultural life in the Weimar Republic. Heyworth is at his best throughout this book when he is chronicling the times of Otto Klemperer, less good, though not bad, on the life. In Klemperer he has found a subject that acts on the detail of 20th-century musical history like a magnet on iron filings, drawing innumerable ...”

“... lucky to be offered a place at Sydney Sussex, that Christmas when the college letter came the best Christmas of my life. Before university, though, there was National Service to be got through, regarded at best as a bore but for me, as a late developer, a long dreaded ordeal; it was touch and go which I got to first ...”

“... My favourite recent book about the Queen is called The Queen’s Knickers by Nicholas Allan. It is a picture book for small children. The centre spread presents several rows of knickers for every royal occasion: Union Jack knickers for state visits, black knickers for state funerals, tartan for Balmoral, knickers printed all over with corgis for home, and appliquéd with real holly for Christmas, ‘which is why she keeps her Christmas message very short ...”

“... a particularly vitriolic review in the Sunday Tribune by one Martin Mansergh. Mansergh’s father, Nicholas, is the distinguished Cambridge historian, and Mansergh fils (a Protestant) is Head of Research in the opposition Fianna Fail party. ‘Research’ is Fianna Fail code for ‘Northern Ireland’, and English readers will get some idea of Mansergh’s ...”

“... fabulous loss. Nabokov, whose account of his Russian childhood, Speak, Memory, must be one of the best books the Revolution produced, sometimes thought in later life of revisiting the places on which his memory fastened, while knowing that to do so would have been preposterous, an indignity. The reasons for not going back had as much to do with art as with ...”

“... the conventions of 18th-century musical language. Why don’t they just sound peculiar or at best interesting? (I suppose that’s how they did sound to many of Mozart’s contemporaries.) It is as though he had found a way to let everyone dream his own dream. Psychoanalysts do not respect the manifest content of dreams, and Maynard Solomon’s ...”

“... they would cover an area the size of Wales. Nonetheless, Cervantes’s romance has been voted the best book ever by a bunch of writers – a hundred or so well-known authors from 54 countries, not including Isabel Allende, Bob Dylan or Gabriel García Márquez, who admirably declined to vote. The Guardian did a vox pop. New Puritan about town ...”

“... plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have screwed a giant snail’ (Januszczak, again). Among the recently deceased, no artist is ...”

“... one stripping down a gear box, no one even leaving or entering a house. This is what McEwan does best. He understands the world of lower-middle-class respectability to which Mr and Mrs Lewis belong, and dignifies it through the fineness of attention he pays to it. The world of The Book and the Brotherhood turns between the twin poles of the Oxford college ...”

“... Pope Hadrian VI is even said to have considered the ceiling as a stufa (a ‘sauna’ would be the best translation) full of nude males. But these were exceptional reactions. This book helps persuade us that the ignudi were not only admired, but were intended to be admired, rather like a succession of brilliant similes in a poem which do nothing to advance or ...”

“... Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one among all these fascinating people, we wonder, as we try to keep awake, who left a vivid picture of the ...”