“... for putting oneself to this task. Isherwood expressed this with typical simplicity in a letter to John Lehmann in July 1939: ‘I am so sick of being a person.’ The beginnings of his interest in Eastern religion were not easy, and this book starts out by conveying powerfully the Tennysonian quality of ‘honest doubt’ that Isherwood felt towards the whole ...”

“... that now bisects the strip. After a negotiating round in Cairo, the White House spokesperson John Kirby said on 23 August that ‘there has been progress made.’ All that was needed was for ‘both sides to come together and work towards implementation’.The background to the negotiations has been the continued destruction of the Gaza Strip. Between ...”

“... set off on his journey, founding abbeys as he went. But when he got to Säckingen the locals took him for a cattle rustler, whipped him and chased him away. Fridolin complained to Clovis, king of the Franks, and returned with a signed charter granting him the island, as well as two messengers who threatened any dissenters with immediate ...”

“... and had the wit to extend the hand of friendship to their enemies in the Union of 1910. The Boers took revenge in 1948 and we all know the unhappy story since then. Both sides are now bypassed for ever. One of the legacies of this emotionally charged colonial war, which has only recently slipped beyond living memory, was the phenomenon of the ‘Boer War ...”

“... or fill in a form or profit from reading a newspaper. He was a habitual scribbler, but it took him the greatest effort to believe in himself as a serious writer; and after his highbrow Bedales days he never even pretended to be a thinker. At most, when he took up the theory that Italian peasants, unlike the ...”

“... guide to British curiosities, that the bones of giants had been discovered in Essex. The evidence took the form of limb bones the size of small tree trunks, and enormous teeth. The local people were familiar with legends of their oversized forebears, and the bones provided visible testimony to the history behind the legends. As in Essex, so in classical ...”

“... an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems took in the observable world, including everything glimpsed in his peripheral vision. There was the hand-held and eye-level, frame-by-frame actuality of In Parenthesis (1937), his poem of the trenches, noise-saturated, full of chiaroscuro and stalked by ...”

“... I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my pocket in which I used to jot down scraps of overheard conversation, ideas for plays or sketches and (very seldom) thoughts on life. I stopped around 1990, by which time I’d accumulated 30 or so of these little hardbacked books ...”

“... at its flapping corners in awkward gusts of Welsh wind.My father was very fond of maps. He took great care to respect the original creases when folding them and arranged them next to his impressive run of National Geographic, whose bright yellow spines I liked. I think he believed in maps at a very literal level, not simply as a reliable guide for ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... male and female, to submit their work, the change was dramatic. The first open Salon took place in September, just weeks after the decree; it accepted 22 female exhibitors, twenty of whom owed their visibility and commercial platform directly to the revolutionary upheavals.France’s new exhibiting artists hadn’t learned to paint in a ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... Sir John Gielgud is 75. To hear him talk or watch him on the stage he seems much younger, whereas his recollections of the lions of the Edwardian theatre ought to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for ...”