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“... the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological ...”

“... vertical extension appealed to him. Or was it the overwhelming majoritarian colour of an object? Kenneth Silver places Soutine between ‘the Talmud on the one hand and Brillat-Savarin, Escoffier and countless other gastronomes on the other’. When he actually lists Soutine’s subjects, he seems closer to Parson Woodforde: ‘beef, veal, lamb and ...”

“... to kick Al who padlocked         tire chains to an axle, then swung at Dan who sprayed silver paint.         When my friends understood that I was drunk or crazy – drunk and         crazy – they stepped back. We headed towards the airport, Just Married,         my bride relentlessly and appropriately blubbering ...”

“... Between Us Girls in 1957, after he had ended a period of collaboration with his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell. A classics scholar and failed actor, Halliwell was devoted to the gay literary canon avant la lettre, and had tutored Orton in the homosexual literary tradition from the Greeks to Genet. ‘Together,’ Francesca Coppa writes in her excellent ...”

“... In part ten​ of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark turned his attention to the Enlightenment, the age of the great amateurs. These were men ‘rich and independent enough to do what they liked’, who nevertheless did things which required considerable ability, men like Lord Burlington, the architect earl. A connoisseur, an ‘arbiter of taste’, Clark explained, ‘the sort of character who these days is much despised ...”

“... definition predicated on rupture. Against this orthodoxy several scholars – the art historians Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more conservative than Modernist. Winter writes in this revisionist tradition but attacks on a broader front. He has ...”

“... your own morals intact, has served other breathless and heavy-breathing narrators very well since. Kenneth Anger has been this kind of wallflower at the orgy for years. The dragon king of gorgeous Hollywood has him in thrall. His snappy chapter-headings (‘Closely Observed Blondes’, ‘Babylon Boozers’, ‘Hollywood Drugstore’) give a promise that is ...”

“... rather than awe-struck. The two books under review approach their subject from opposite corners. Kenneth Harris trudges deferentially through his subject’s life, like one of those grey-haired guides in cardigans who steer tourists through National Trust houses. Until the Epilogue he takes elephantine care never to appear to intrude his own ...”

“... one to rise to no heroics. What is the charm, after all, but just the abyss of the familiar.’ Kenneth Clark, who grew up at Sudbourne Hall, a now demolished Wyatt house near Orford, said that what made the Dark Ages so dark was ‘the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness’. The way some of its admirers talk about ...”

“... of short art films in the cinema. Wheldon could be extraordinarily insensitive. I remember the silver wedding party given by dear friends who lived on the banks of the Thames in an idyllic setting but where the architecture ran to the kind of bungalow celebrated by Kingsley Amis in The Riverside Villa Murder. Deputed to propose the couple’s health, Huw ...”

“... the first word on the subject, in the nature of things it could scarcely be the last. By contrast, Kenneth Rose’s superb biography will surely stand as the best and most interesting study of George V that we are ever likely to get. There is much greater understanding by the author of his subject, and the public and private lives are brought together with ...”

“... has had a long life, in art college reading lists in particular; a more active one certainly than Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, to which it was an indirect riposte. Schmoller’s anger was misplaced. He might have loathed the look, but here at least was a book which was all of a piece. In 1972, the battle for the visual integrity of Penguin paperbacks was ...”

“... shine with the same sci-fi glamour Beaton gave to the layabout dandy Stephen Tennant in his famous silver-and-leather portrait of 1927. In the same year, Beaton photographed Tennant dressed in pearls and white silk as a sleeping Prince Charming awaiting a kiss. (The catalogue tells us the picture ‘invites interpretation as a study in gender ...”

“... curious incident of the dog in the night time’ is a quote from the Sherl0ck Holmes story ‘Silver Blaze’, which features a painted horse and a dog that doesn’t bark. In ‘Silver Blaze’ the horse is missing and a man is dead; in The Curious Incident the dog is dead and a woman is missing – a calculatedly ...”

“... had also had a number of long-term boyfriends, including Alfred Leslie and the photographer Walter Silver. (When she left Price’s suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel it was to tell Robert Keene, her third husband, she wanted a divorce.) Throughout the book, Curtis is quietly attentive to the ways in which Hartigan tried to balance intimacy, artistic freedom ...”