“... a good-natured dig but spot-on – and Richmal Crompton, whose William has very little time for ‘Anthony Martin’, whom he once encounters in the flesh. Yet William is an equally reassuring figure, whom we know will grow up sound, just as Milne himself did, according to the not unmalicious eulogy propounded by Frank Swinnerton. Milne is so far out of the ...”

“... to the rites of the Church he has just saved from thousands of its foes, he stabs the altar cross, spills the holy water and swears to live for ever as God’s enemy. In interviews Coppola and the author of the screenplay, James V. Hart, have insisted on the gripping irony of this situation and on their sense of Dracula as a fallen angel. Great love in ...”

“... Schmitt refuses to speculate on the antecedents of his medieval phantoms in earlier belief or on cross-pollination with cultures ancient and distant. But he allows glimpses, when he cites Scottish tales recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century, or the village hauntings taken down by the monk of Byland in Yorkshire two hundred years later, in which ...”

“... missing seems to have been some diaries and papers which are restricted during the lifetime of Anthony West, and the correspondence with Beaverbrook, which Rebecca and Max burned together at her flat in 1930. With great skill Victoria Glendinning concentrates attention on the story she has been asked to tell. Rebecca was to the end, as one of her ...”

“... and they stayed (in a sense) together for ten years. The difficulty of bringing up her son Anthony alone caused distress and, later, bitter resentment on Anthony’s side. All this is related in letters here to Wells, to friends and, in terms that are painful to read, to her son. She had done everything for him, she ...”

“... in the chess game he had started before being scrambled. When the news of his Distinguished Flying Cross for ‘devotion to duty’ was announced in the evening news bulletin, Jackson was heard bellowing from the bar in his strange, gravelly voice: ‘Devotion to duty? What about bwavewy?’ His rumbustious arrogance was intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at ...”

“... all round the country, and the entertainer who had been spirited away somewhere between King’s Cross and Leeds had swarms of aspiring sound-alikes as far as the BBC transmitters could reach. The story of his disappearance made headlines in the national papers the following day. Posters went up in shop windows, and Peter Brough offered a reward of £1000 ...”

“... with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous. At the peak of his Manhattan ...”

“... More striking is the fact that between 14 May and 30 June one and a half million men responded to Anthony Eden’s appeal to join the Local Defence Volunteers. Dad’s Army may have been a bit of a joke, but it was not a sign of defeatism. During the Blitz the men from the Ministry sometimes painted a grim picture of desperation and near-panic in the ...”

“... for they all took it very seriously, with intense talks and conjurations in the manner of Anthony Powell’s The Kindly Ones with its highly diverting mumbo-jumbo in which ‘the image of the all is the godhead of the true.’ Such associations were part of being enlightened at the time, and Graves’s bible had always been The Way of All ...”

“... at a dark conclusion: ‘... to whom Melancholy gave life and death’. The story relayed to us by Anthony à Wood, that Burton hanged himself in order to satisfy, as exactly as possible, a horoscopical prediction, must rank as one of the most spectacular examples extant of what philosophers call ‘making it true’. It is however too neat to be quite ...”

“... committees could be traced directly back, in an evolutionary way, to the series of experiments in cross-party scrutiny committees launched in the early 1960s. The major change in 1979 was that the system was made more comprehensive and more clearly related to the structure of Whitehall departments, though with no new powers of investigation. In general, the ...”

“... kept breaking through. It is always interesting to speculate about motivation. The psychologist Anthony Storr put forward the theory that Churchill was a depressive engaged in a hyperactive struggle to ward off the blues, and the evidence bears this out. Until reading Gilbert I had never quite realised before what a mania Churchill had for travel in ...”

“... more sheer fact than exists in the whole of Audition.The book’s characters make up a demographic cross-section, perhaps skewed towards middle age, often with the implied moral seriousness parenthood brings, however fractured the ensuing family. Mary shares custody of their children with her ex-husband in an uneasy, inharmonious arrangement, each alternately ...”

“... with his achingly empty hands, robbed of his masculine model, the football-playing man, the cross-country-skiing man, a man who stood his ground, who never let his gaze drop, but looked everyone boldly in the eye.’ But this isn’t Jim’s situation. He is defined by an absence that has no shape, that can hardly even aspire to the condition of ...”