“... paint the keel of Lord Muskerry’s yacht – and were ravished by its landscapes. Ettore always took his violin with him to London. ‘When I got off the train they would look at me with respect at the station. Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, or the Queen’s Hall? Whereas the car would take me to the furthest and coolest of the suburbs, where I delighted the ...”

“... was terrible, and worryingly vague. One of the bankers who had been brought in to rescue Lehman, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, took fright, stepped out of the building, put in a call to the head of the Bank of America, and arranged the sale of his own bank – a bit like popping out to the loo on a blind date and proposing ...”

“... without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the books were reprinted; academia took them up. Trollope made it into the canon and finally into Westminster Abbey, where a plaque was unveiled in 1993. Among the leaders of the Trollope revival was Virginia Woolf. She admired him for providing ‘the same sort of refreshment and delight that we ...”

“... bears out pretty well the sense implicit in her lightning sketch. Richard Perceval is the son of John, Robert’s youngest brother, who was also snubbed, patronised and cold-shouldered. Richard Perceval has written excellent studies, admirably researched, of A.E. Housman and of the Powys brothers, but now is the time to strike a blow for father and get ...”

“... it’s the old story in nice new Faber covers. In essence, Peters aims to do for the life what John Carey did for the works with his applauded Thackeray, Prodigal Genius (1977): that is to say: re-tread familiar ground with brisk, commonsensical illumination. This she does well. Thackeray’s Universe is attractively written and profits the reader with a ...”

“... a pinhead on which academics would happily dance for eternity – Chadwyck-Healey simply took the 1350 poets listed as poets in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Rather than wait for CBEL3, as it is to be called – whose volumes will materially reshape the canon – Chadwyck-Healey took its list ...”

“... tone was installed at Bouverie Street. Punches were henceforth pulled. The conquered writer took his radicalism elsewhere, founding Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine and Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. They were not successful – at least, not on Punch’s scale. The times were changing. Revolutions on the Continent had terrified the British ...”

“... of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète on the radio. ‘There were adults in the world who took it seriously. I felt like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint in the sand.’At Johns Hopkins University, where his major was art history, Murch collaborated on a few short films and discovered that editing images had the same intoxicating impact as ...”

“... the programme was ‘one-sided, anti-educational and misleading’. He said of Channel 4 that ‘I took them at face value – a grave error.’ A 1997 film about environmentalists by the same director, Martin Durkin, caused Channel 4 to have to broadcast a prime-time apology. The Independent Film Commission ruled that ‘comparison of the unedited and edited ...”

“... that when Kazuo Ishiguro was studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia his tutor took him to one side. Ishiguro was at the time writing stories like the one contained in Firebird 2 – a punchy little McEwanesque conte in which the narrator’s mother dies from eating a poisoned fish. The tutor, who had worked in advertising, explained to ...”

“... apparently aggrieved author, Amis showed himself notably unresentful and unlitigious. Indeed, he took the offence as an occasion to ruminate good-naturedly on the oddities of literary ‘borrowing’. It’s relevant to bring this up since Other People depends very largely on a trick which is usually thought to be someone else’s trademark. First, to ...”

“... to have cost £80,000: the Whig spent £30,000 and still lost. The burden could be crippling. John Benett, MP for Wiltshire, was told by his brother in 1820: ‘The failure of the subscriptions at both the last elections has already thrown an overwhelming debt upon your property, and one that you will never see cleared as long as you live.’ And all for ...”

“... intact into the storm centre of Revolutionary politics. In ‘De la Nature’ Saint-Just took the theoretical framework of European natural law and contorted it to express his own hectic vision of the chasm between the social, economic and political realities of Ancien Régime France and the ways in which human beings could hope to live as he ...”

“... governess, Miss Tink. Miss Tink, for all the monosyllabic innocence of her name, had a bad cousin, John, who may well also have influenced the child Borges, because he was one of the street-corner ‘hoodlums’ who later fascinated him, partly for being so brave as well as bad, when they fought, and partly because he saw them as ideal compendia of the local ...”

“... as though the same weren’t true of countless artists in the capitals of Europe. When I took on these attitudes I was writing a book full of admiration for John Clare as a local poet, and I was learning to admire Constable as, principally, a local painter. But to be modern was to be metropolitan; and to be a ...”