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“... ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in which John Wayne plays the ‘fearsome yet admirable’ Marine Sergeant John Stryker, introduced him to the American model. ‘If you look at films like that, buttered with message, it’s easier to comprehend the unguarded innocence ...”

“... family imploded. Her mother fell ill with TB, her father delegated home life to the 14-year-old John and chaos ensued. In some ways it was liberating, as Boty recalled in the long interview she gave in 1965 to Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women. With her mother in hospital or at home bedridden there was ‘a fantastic amount of freedom’, but there ...”

“... to trial and Leon gets his comeuppance by hounding them so obsessively that he misses out on a major national news story. This story is well-paced, competently told and not without suspense, but it would be silly to pretend that the main interest of the novel lay in its plot. In a proselytising ‘editorial’ column on page two, Stevenson imagines a world ...”

“... the reactions of publishers. Too much, that is, for all except those who regard Paul Scott as a major 20th-century novelist. Of these there must surely be few. Scott’s reputation rests, rightly, I think, on the four novels that make up the ‘Raj Quartet’ and the last short novel Staying on that won the Booker Prize. The two thousand pages of the ‘Raj ...”

“... But why should politics have to do exclusively with change? It is true that only in the occasional major outbreaks like 1549 or 1607 do we encounter anything remotely resembling the class language of modern times, or any serious demands for a change of regime at the top. But politics surely consists of all those matters that concern the public weal, whether of ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... bay. ‘Live upon sixpence a day – and earn it’ was the cure for gout advocated by the surgeon John Abernethy. The traffic in quack cures for gout in the 18th century well merits the description ‘Aesculapian bedlam’. But gout did not monopolise the scene. In the 1740s the gout wars were heavily overshadowed by the pamphlets of Bishop Berkeley, the ...”

“... their wounds kissed better, we can be distracted from the worst of pains, since attention is a major and early factor in its development. Pain even dismisses itself when there are more urgent priorities. The need to get away from danger, or towards safety, can put pain into abeyance: many soldiers wounded in battle do not feel pain until behind the ...”

“... the same way that heart, lungs and other physical organs grow to maturity. And the psycholinguist John Marshall has drawn attention to the resemblance between this ‘new organology’ and aspects of phrenological thinking. The educational psychologist Howard Gardner has refurbished the old idea that there are distinct forms of intellectual ability, not just ...”

“... link between biographer and subject. She imparts no love of Katherine Anne Porter, and this is the major ethical misdemeanour of the book. She often seems to feel that her subject was not much more than a dishy madcap who dropped everything for a new love and wrote as arbitrarily as a peaky Victorian younger daughter might have, or like an unmarriageable young ...”

“... had just inherited in shady circumstances, after furious litigation, a fortune from her friend Sir John Scott: but there was perpetual bickering and backbiting about the allowance. One of Harold’s reasons for seeking in 1929 the more lucrative path of journalism was to escape dependence upon his half-mad mother-in-law. Harold Nicolson was born in 1886 in ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”

“... adds: ‘So far as writings in English are concerned, I can claim that I have probably missed no major evidence in Anglo-Saxon and possibly missed no more than a few in the much larger field of Middle English.’ This is a challenge to a reviewer, but one soon finds that what Burrow means is not, as one might think, that he has looked through most of the ...”

“... three periods: The Early Years (0-6), The Middle Years (6-9), and The Late Years (9 to 11). Its major episodes – the encounter with Edward Penn, aged seven, muralist; Edwin’s doomed love for the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the ...”

“... trench warfare on the Western Front. Professor Graham’s theme is the one endlessly inculcated by John Terraine and now finding wider acceptance among military historians: that the British Army’s great series of victories in 1918 should be seen as the ‘pay-off’ for lessons painfully learned in the previous three years. The early British offensives, made ...”