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“... Philip Larkin’s lines have taken hold over the years, calling to them the confirmatory evidence of family histories, uniting disparate and apparently unconnected offspring under their aegis. Few authors in recent fiction have addressed themselves to the universal family romance with Caroline Blackwood’s bleakness ...”

“... subjects of Barrow’s ‘double portrait’, his friends Quentin Crisp and the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, were both children of the Home Counties. Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent a significant part of his tumultuous life ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... been deleted altogether. Are modern times really so terrible?If The Soaring Pilot was our bible, Philip Wills was our bard. That remarkable man had started gliding in 1933 (how close to the Wright brothers that is beginning to seem!), and by 1939 had not only established himself as the leading British pilot, but had shown in those few years that it was ...”

“... I know, has paraphrase been taken this seriously as a literary form. As in his pseudo-biography of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead (2004), Carrère has largely relied on already published sources, Limonov’s extensive self-portraiture first and foremost. He seldom questions Limonov’s veracity, except when it would be howlingly absurd not to ...”

“... why, and why we could not have been consulted first, I am unlikely now ever to discover. Mr Philip Sidey, Head of Network Centre, the administrative head of BBC Birmingham, objected strongly to the play, and Mr Shaun Sutton, Head of Drama Group, Television, effected the ban. At a meeting with the latter, I was told ...”

“... once he made that choice, he was whole-hearted. He learned English from a female tobacconist in Sutton Coldfield and etiquette from an upper-middle-class nurse. He ended up with a plummy accent, a collection of bow ties and the habit of drinking tea from a bone china cup. For many years he denied his origins: he told the Jewish Chronicle he wasn’t Jewish ...”

“... invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also regularly entertained Neville ...”