“... is offering here – in the previous volume his narrator has presented Cottard as an idiot and Charles Swann as the most discreet of men, driven to name-dropping only by his desire to impress the woman he loves and her terrible crowd of friends – he saw something else, and this is what Rose brilliantly sees him seeing:The sentence that blows Genet’s ...”

“... Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays the fey and garrulous fence who sets Robert de Niro up with his criminal opportunities. There is ...”

“... the comic implications of the earlier sentence were so beautifully disguised in bumbling. When Charles Stringham, a friend of Jenkins, mentions his time at Oxford, he does so with flamboyant understatement: ‘I explained … that my own college days had been among the most melancholic of a life not untinged by shadow.’ When Jenkins himself offers the ...”

“... and his translation is a remarkable pioneering work, a rich seed which has produced a sacred wood. However, it wasn’t until Dryden’s translation of 1697 that the Aeneid became naturalised as a major English poem. Like Gavin Douglas, Dryden writes out of pride in his nation and his native language, and he aims to create a consolidating, monumental ...”

“... quite different: Mabel, for instance, who lacks toys, or Ada, whose hair goes in ringlets. Nor did Charles Kingsley conceive The Water-Babies as an unambiguous parable about the dirty poor requiring a good going over before they were fit ‘to enter paradise alongside the already clean and respectable’. Kingsley’s obsession with washing and cold water was ...”

“... by a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled syntax of ...”

“... no problems in the market; they’re French, not Third World produce. In Dominica, Dame Eugenia Charles, Prime Minister since 1980, and magnificent champion of her island’s interests, is not giving in to the pressure of international free trade. She has said that if her people can’t make a living from bananas they will not starve: they will turn to ...”

“... instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same advantage.’ He hated disorder. His father, Charles Lutyens, was a horse painter of decreasing reputation (Lutyens had no pictures in his house when he first married so as not to have to hang any of his father’s) who became eccentric (dunking roast potatoes in tea) and parsimonious (using newspapers as ...”

“... reminiscent of inanimate, toxic material: pools of tar, sand and cement, broken brick and burned wood – the bombed London he’d seen for himself. If Auerbach is proposing anything, it’s that in the least promising settings there can be fresh starts.In what has become a well-known quotation, Auerbach told Hughes: ‘I have a strong sense that London ...”

“... Knives’, when Macmillan was panicked by a typical Rab Butler indiscretion into sacking the dead wood in his Cabinet, Deedes was brought in to oversee the Government’s public relations. Spin-doctors were unheard of at that time, and Deedes’s task was to exploit his Fleet Street contacts to the Government’s advantage. There were, after all, only two ...”

“... Vasari) further contributed to the myth that Piero had been unable to realise his masterpiece.When Charles Eastlake bought the painting for the National Gallery in 1874, Thomson Hankey, the MP for Peterborough, challenged the Treasury to defend its acquisition of ‘a wreck … ruined beyond redemption’. He had a point: the panel was split, there were candle ...”

“... the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming aboard. So ...”

“... I just know up from down. I just know there and back, what’s before me and what’s behind. St Charles Borromeo, behind me, is called ‘our church’. The school of St Charles Borromeo is called ‘our school’. Up ahead is Bankbottom, that is called ‘home’: I am slow with the word ‘home’, because no one says ...”

“... most modern. As striking as the tennis shoes, in this respect, is the ‘little bottle of Coty’s Wood-violet perfume, half-empty’, which Connie leaves among Mellors’s things after her second night at the cottage, where it is subsequently discovered by his malevolent wife. ‘She wanted him to remember her in the perfume.’ Spraying perfume on your ...”

“... He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a ...”