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“... James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been ...”

“... be standardised critically in terms of other people and their conventional problems. To assert, as Adrian Wright continually does, that familiar traumas and ‘terrible truths’ lie under it collapses art into convention, and indeed into banality. Shorn of the disguise that is itself, the allurements and the personality of its humours, it can look no ...”

“... extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed British ...”

“... route of the architect ran between the drawing board and the building site. After Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, both as cavalier with language as they were scrupulous with architectural detail, you could scarcely be thought an internationally significant architect unless you not only built but wrote and globetrotted, discoursing as you went. The ...”

“... McEwen’s phrase about the ‘fickle pursuit of French fashion’ catches one end of the tone. Adrian Searle’s dismay at Bloomsbury’s ‘domesticated’ and ‘palatable’ dilutions of European Modernism catches the other, hinting at the particular nightmare that haunts half the English art world, which finds the Bloomsbury example embarrassing ...”

“... could bear the specific sense of ‘female infant’. This semantic shift is not mentioned in Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Changes in Meaning, but it seems to be one of the few things that have escaped his notice. There are books that please you greatly by telling you what you know already, and almost as much by telling you what you do not ...”

“... from his acceptance as genuine of absurd photographs faked by two enterprising small girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. This final phase of eccentricity and sheer gullibility had succeeded upon a long lifetime’s interest in spiritualism and psychical research. In his later twenties Doyle was beginning to organise séances, and the first of these to ...”

“... strong smell as a bad smell. In one of the few investigations of the subject before Corbin’s, Adrian Stokes noted that unlike the other four senses, that of scent had not inspired any art, or aesthetic cultivation. (I think Stokes may have overlooked the use of the nose in wine-bibbing.) There is no educational encouragement to improve one’s keenness of ...”

“... has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years were 1927 ...”