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“... to be as acute a Christian dramatist as any Italian. The negative space between Holbein’s risen Jesus and his Magdalen is as agonising as that in the National Gallery’s better-known canvas on the same theme by Titian. Titian​ is effectively the backbone of Caroline art history, to the extent, that is, that any theme can be said to have informed ...”

“... and ships raised by the government of India occupied the Persian port of Bushehr at great expense. James Outram, who lends his name to many neighbourhoods in India, led the British forces. He returned to India to quell the uprising known as the Indian Mutiny – or, depending on your choice of historian, the First Indian War of Independence. As Indian rebels ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... accommodation, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and hostels. By the end of 2023, that number had risen to 112,660 English households, including 145,800 children, the worst figures since modern homelessness law came into effect in the 20th century. In reality, the number is much higher. It’s not easy to be recognised as statutorily homeless, even if you ...”

“... against his nature, been disciplined to coolness. The terms in which he praises a fellow scholar (James Woolley) have to take the risk of seeming to wish to be transferred home, as indeed would be deserved: ‘The whole essay is a model of rigorous but imaginative scholarship.’ It has been easy for people to be snide about Ehrenpreis’s having taken more ...”

“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t know, about ...”

“... lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife ...”

“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”

“... scene and returns in her mind ‘to the wells and springs of childhood’, as the New Zealand poet James Baxter put it, that her writing opens up. Mansfield herself was clear about the distinction. Her notebooks and reviews return again and again to the split between fiction as art and as ‘entertainment’, the glory of the perhaps failed attempt as against ...”

“... you don’t install mirrored wardrobes.’ Later on there’s a two-page spread of the young actor James Franco’s lips. That’s Gentleman’s Quarterly for you: a magazine for men who want to have what women have – clean nails, hairless chests, fresh armpits and moist lips. A magazine for men clever enough to want to look like the kind of person they’re ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”

“... in the Piazza Navona, watching the solemn celebrations inside and outside the church of Saint James of the Spanish. A ‘castle’ had been erected on top of each of the fountains in the piazza. As Piers watched, an angel descended from one of the castles and set fire to an ‘artifitiall divell’. Musical instruments sounded and fireworks exploded. Then ...”

“... cutting when the yellow flag iris comes into flower because by then the oils in the bog will have risen, but not everyone waits that long. It might mean cutting too late, and then the peats won’t dry. If they’re not ready by July, they’re not worth the effort – damp peat is no use to anyone who wants to stay warm. You can also cut too early: a hard ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”