“... affairs could seem quiescent and unrequited – even when they were requited – such as that with John White, alias Wingco, a Spitfire instructor and professor of Renaissance art history she slept with in Paris. There were several affairs, possibly flings, but the names don’t really matter, because the headline news for Brookner as the 1960s approached was ...”

“... persuaded himself, briefly, that the US could create a global cosmopolis in the spirit of Kant. John Rawls, transplanting his theory of justice into the realm of international relations, declared in 1999 that societies that violate human rights rightly provoke economic sanctions and military intervention. Liberal peoples, who are naturally indifferent to ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... longed for the strong arms and unselfconscious attentions of young men from the lower classes. John Addington Symonds, who was, with Carpenter, the bravest and most outspoken among homosexual writers in England in these years, held what he called ‘the wolf’ at bay until 1877, when he met a ‘strapping young soldier with … frank eyes and a pleasant ...”

“... to him, Rowland had stopped all Lonrho advertising going to the Observer because of criticism by John Davies, the City Editor, over the Lonrho-House of Fraser negotiations. Conor Cruise O’Brien was characteristically frank in writing in his column for the paper that it would be absurd for anybody to suppose that he would ...”

“... at his jokes. He was interviewed for the Observer colour supplement and kissed by Edna O’Brien, but privately, as the letters reveal, he was disturbed by recognition. Kathleen Raine’s admiration made him uneasy – ‘it must surely be (for what I would think) the wrong reason’ – and of his poetry in general he wondered: ‘Who will it ...”

“... the point. ‘I have read many pessimistic analyses of “Northern Ireland”,’ Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in sombre admiration, ‘but none that has the bleak conclusiveness of these poems.’Heaney had made a remarkably successful debut with Death of a Naturalist (1966) and his subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... grandeur, Máire Mhac an tSaoi has her own elevated co-ordinates. She is married to Conor Cruise O’Brien. Her father, Sean McEntee, fought in the Irish War of Independence and was a minister in most of Eamon de Valera’s Governments. Her uncle was a cardinal. Every schoolchild of my generation knew her poems, written in Irish, by heart. She is a ...”

“... become a winner, to lift yourself out of the group and leave all those losers behind. But unlike John Ford or Jean Renoir – whose Toni also tells a story of tragic love among migrant workers – Malick conveys scant sense of the group, the living relationships, concordant or discordant, that bind people together. Like the outlaw couple in Badlands, the ...”

“... Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... the midwives that she came from an Irish Traveller background (she gave her name as Isabella O’Brien), that she had never been to school, had never registered with a GP and did not have an NHS number. She said that Gordon was a friend rather than the father of her baby. She spoke in an Irish accent throughout labour, a feat that amazed the mothers on ...”