“... different from the big-lunged belt of her talent show days: whimpering and coquettish, with a Michael Jackson hiccup. On ‘Baby One More Time’ it was paired with a jarring three-note riff and an instantly famous video shot in a high school, resetting the pop clocks with a controlled explosion of scrunchies, crop tops and love hearts. For a moment in ...”

“... become more rarified. Walking through London in the spring of 1938, with the sense of being on the snow line of a new ice age, depression overwhelms him like a black wave. ‘Whitehall is a gloomy street,’ he writes, ‘... and at night dead as the Acropolis, and my own past and the past of history came up like a darker cloud in the dark night, and I seemed ...”

“... comically herself by saying she is a born dandelion, while her husband wants her to be a white snow-flower. Here and elsewhere there are far-off echoes of the great turgid symbol-systems of The Rainbow and Women in Love, and the dualisms of Twilight in Italy (North and South, ice and sun, water and heat, the rainbow as synthesis of pure light and pure ...”

“... the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Small and painted yellow, they were like cats lying in the snow in winter and in the sun in summer.’ Or: ‘The lonely lantern which stood before it reminded one of an orphan vainly trying to smile through its tears.’ From Flight without End (1927): ‘It was an icy night, so cold that at first I thought even a shout ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... be adroit at saving the appearances. At a dinner given when he was full of years and honours, C.P. Snow made a long speech referring to him as ‘a whisper of the conscience of England’. Priestley thanked the speakers in a few words and said he hoped they would now join him in walking upon the water. His sense of himself was romantic and naive but also ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... she earned money, typed, edited, corrected, corresponded for, drove, agented, protected, cleared snow from the car, and whole-heartedly agreed about everything with the man of whom she made her life. She was, according to friends, ‘the international champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition’, ‘the Saint Sebastian of wives’. The marriage and ...”

“... that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling.’ It takes a page or two to get used to the sweeping syntactic line with its regular insurance clauses taken out in mid-sentence to guard against anything so crass as a straight statement of descriptive ...”

“... subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the ...”

“... without care’, silent but for the constant ‘voice of cold water’, with skies of ‘cutting snow’, even in June. This is a land of ‘fear and shock’ where the buzzard is king: He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping ...”

“... had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM. 27 January. To Leeds by the 9.10 train with snow flurries much of the way. I call at the British Epilepsy Association, where I have to sign some books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the ...”

“... of asking ministers questions arising from the document, handed it to the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, and his department. Let no one kid themselves that, in our system, Select Committees of the House of Commons with an in-built Government majority will perform the same investigatory functions as the Committees of Congress. On really delicate ...”

“... the end of La Grande Illusion, when the two French soldiers, dressed in black, are trudging up a snow-covered mountain, their awkward movements apparently choreographed in a kind of counterpoint? Or is it in the spaces he leaves for us to fill in, what Truffaut calls ‘un travail semi-improvisé, volontairement in-achevé, “ouvert”, en sorte que chaque ...”

“... numbers, the ravens may be a worse danger still. The birds have become what the wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a ‘subsidised species’, meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house-cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around the edges of the deep desert have encouraged a population explosion among ...”