“... Ruskin’, by which they mean doesn’t have a close familiarity with the 39 maroon volumes of Cook and Wedderburn’s magnificent Library Edition of his works, together with an immediate ability to identify obscurities such as the ‘dear Greek princess’ (the legendary wife of the Doge Selvo, who is said to have introduced forks to Venetian society and ...”

“... in Boston. He was a state senator at the time in Illinois and running for national office. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, a singularly drab and prevaricating man, had been much taken by Obama after appearing on stage with him in Chicago. Many were taken with him. He was the ‘It’ guy, the papers said so. It isn’t much of a ...”

“... to Whitehall, to the sound of ‘such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard the like’. John Evelyn went further: This day, his majesty, Charles II, came to London … with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets ...”

“... in 1968 and would stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many others.When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson could quit his job ...”

“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... are catalogued in The Road to Wellville (1993), a novel about the cereal manufacturer Dr John Harvey Kellogg – inventor, in Boyle’s phrase, of ‘gastrically correct foods’. He makes surreal play of Kellogg’s determination to force his guests at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to eat his nutritional products: ‘Nut Lisbon Steak, Protose ...”

“... with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early ...”

“... which was, roughly speaking, all the time that was left from thinking about what to wear, what to cook, and what colour to paint the downstairs lavatory. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not nearly as much of one as I would like it to be. I am the same age as Germaine Greer and therefore in much the same relation to the subject of her new book, The ...”

“... the same wary pragmatism. It is, I agree, ‘startling’ (the word used by Alan Sked and Chris Cook in their Post-War Britain: A Political History) to find the Director-General of the CBI saying during the General Election campaign of 1974 that the 1971 Act had ‘sullied every relationship at every level between unions and employers and ought to be ...”

“... we know from The Canterbury Tales) and submission to ‘the authority of the circumstance’ which John Bayley has ascribed to the pastoral mode in literature. But not the peculiarly Indian circumstance, for these characters and their situations, no matter how carefully located in Malgudi, have an innate tendency to turn themselves into universal ...”

“... and a pot of white paint. It was like looking at the winning entry in an outdoor spinach roulade cook-off. The going in the enclosures was also soft. The mud, and the straw which stewards had scattered onto the mud, was wattling-and-daubing race-goer’s footwear. We flapped to the bookies in raffia snowshoes. Despite the conditions, there were several women ...”

“... to put up with. The author’s note in The Sweetest Dream is more than a metafictional trick, like John Ray Jr, PhD’s foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita, the outsider’s perspective on the mad and repellent Humbert Humbert, telling us it’s all right to sit back and enjoy the perversions of others. This is Doris Lessing: not playful, not one for fun, the ...”

“... becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – THINK NOW!’In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they ...”

“... cavernous kitchens in the basement and of two women who moved about in them – Mrs Benjamin, the cook, who was massive and dressed in butcher’s blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after ...”