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“... owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is credited with giving currency to the term ‘the Industrial Revolution’); Toynbee Hall in London’s East End is named after him. This skeletal family tree ...”

“... editor reproduced a small photograph of a small portrait copied from a very small photograph of a young woman named, so Mossy averred, Nora Joseph Barnacle. A name, I need not tell you, well known by then throughout the world of literature.’ ‘Barnacle?’ said Hunty. ‘But that is a kind of goose.’ ‘Mossy’s story about it was that some ten years ...”

“... along the street to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, passing on the way a covey of priests and earnest young laity en route for a pro-life demonstration. I feel sorry for these devout and less than butch youths (me, once), knowing the priests look down on them, while longing for sterner converts.At first the palazzo seems closed and we have to circumambulate the ...”

“... to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the young Parliament. Yet the problem is not the Parliament, it’s the people, and the people’s drowsy addiction to imagined injury – their belief in a paralysing historical distress – which makes the country assert itself not as a modern nation open to ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... you go back to the hotel?’); sexual longing, confusion and mad passions; teenage marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more ...”

“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... drove the swelling tide of revolution. Reading of them now, one is inevitably reminded of the young Russians of the same period and their excited dabblings in what their counterparts in the 1960s would call ‘alternative lifestyles’. Foster cites ‘feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism’ as beliefs impelling the revolutionary ...”

“... also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of A Strong Song Tows Us and the New Directions Complete Poems, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggle-toothed, twinkling-eyed ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... and drugs offences. 114 are serving life sentences, including Dennis Nilsen, who strangled 16 young men at his flat in North London. A year ago the paedophile, Leslie Bailey, was murdered in his cell. There is a greater concentration of high-security prisoners at Whitemoor than at any other jail in Britain. On Saturday, 10 September, the day after the ...”

“... Dandyish in dress, affected in bearing, snobbish in choice of acquaintance, he was the sort of young person who admired H.L. Mencken for the wrong reasons. He seems also to have been interested in impressing a ghastly-sounding Mama, though she would have been less delighted to learn of his amateur homoerotics than of his easy resort to conventional ...”

“... her helpful analysis of Sloane’s library, Wilkins’s work was one of the first folios which the young Hans Sloane purchased when he reached London as an ambitious apothecary in the early 1680s. Decades later, various drafts of his will underlined the high religious purpose he reckoned such collections should discharge, especially ‘the manifestation of the ...”

“... in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous affairs and the death of their daughter, of meningitis, two days after her first birthday, led to their separation. However, when Loy became pregnant as a result ...”

“... sunken, lustrous invalid eyes (he had nightmares about finding himself in bed with a fat woman), young men with the kind of body you now see in jeans advertisements, Greek drapery, Renaissance bowers and flowers, all seen in a curious dusky light – his people flee the sun like ghosts at cock-crow and come out as the last light gilds the hilltops, their ...”