“... has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie seemed like a person ready for the world outside and he left school as soon as he was allowed to. Someone remembered him on a trip to Wales. ‘Ronnie said he was in the dorm when a little boy came and sat on the end of his bed in the middle of the night, a boy dressed in ...”

“... fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical detail and appeared in 1984, when ...”

“... chief in Pimpernel Smith and, if it was in the late 1940s we would have seen him as Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist and Jaggers in Great Expectations. It was Francis L. Sullivan, whose huge bulk must have been gracing the stage of the Grand that week, though we did not know it, thinking only that a creature from the celestial realms of film had materialised in, of ...”

“... title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off ...”

“... and repressed appetites. And I have no doubt that when I was marched off with Maureen to see Oliver! on the stage, I recognised a little of my absent mother in the character of Nancy. Margaret had suddenly grown up – and she’d become robust. Nancy faded from my imagination, but Maureen never quite gave her up: the strong girl with the heart of gold ...”

“... we can tell) Henrician authors circulated literary manuscripts without terror. A regime otherwise ready to seize on the faintest indiscretions of expendable politicians gave latitude to their poetry and political theory. It does not seem to have occurred to the Crown, when it prosecuted More or Wyatt or Surrey, to hunt for treason in their works of ...”

“... for them camels!’ warns the fastidious Waller. At the conclusion of ‘Spring Cleaning (Getting Ready for Love)’ (1936), he convincingly imitates a raucous old vacuum cleaner being revved up. The machine faces a daunting challenge if it hopes to suck in the bits and pieces of all the songs that Waller has decimated, and even a few camel droppings. Why ...”

“... hour in our history – the big question. MAN: General, if war comes, is this country really ready? EISENHOWER: It is not. The administration has spent many billions of dollars for national defence. Yet today we haven’t enough tanks for the fighting in Korea. It is time for a change. FIRST ANNOUNCER: The nation, haunted by the stalemate in ...”

“... O’Neill, Chekhov, Ibsen. It was only when he moved with his white soon to be second wife, Judy Oliver, to her home town of St Paul in 1978 that his interest in playwrighting began in earnest. He wrote children’s plays on science-related subjects for the Science Museum of Minnesota; the Penumbra Theatre mounted a disastrous satirical musical, Black ...”

“... in his armchair, which was the one that had tried to levitate. He seemed, by his watchful silence, ready to put an end to any nonsense, from furniture or guests or any other quarter. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Ijaz flaked his baklava over his lap, he juggled with his fork and jiggled his coffee cup. After our dinner party, he said, almost the next ...”

“... rally, their blue and white banners aloft under lowering skies, their manner aggressive-dejected, ready to make a point: these were thoroughbred Serbs, impoverished and passionate, dressed in standard-issue combats and busy T-shirts. It was a promising moment for the Radical leader Tomislav Nikolic, deputising for the party’s president, Vojislav Seselj, who ...”

“... or wanting to be alone together,’ Arthur noted in his diary. She always seemed so secure, so ready to talk, so willing to do anything for anyone, that it is very pathetic to think what was going on behind. In fact, the whole record seems a tragic one … Her diary is very painful to me because it shows how little in common they had and how cruel he ...”

“... beetle Gregor by his family, of Woyzeck by the captain, of Jews by Nazis, Russians by Communists, Oliver Twist by Bumble, of Smike by Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby was one of Canetti’s early and passionate enthusiasms)? For such an artist, the inner world, the world of his invention, cannot and should not be any different from the world of human and historical ...”

“... with convincing ease: When I hear the English tongue Like a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a ...”

“... will meet his fans’ highest expectations. In American letters I can compare Thomas only with Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the one whom Americans think of first). But although both were medical professors and, in their time, deans, their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing ...”