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“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... Lawrence’s own view of the Anabasis was tellingly different. It was, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, a ‘pretentiously simple’ tale, ‘cunningly full of writing tricks’. The essays in The Long March, a much needed new companion to the Anabasis, provide explanations of some of these tricks. Whether analysing the Ten Thousand as a mobile Greek ...”

“... about the state of society from the Bulger killing is probably a mistake. Blake Morrison has John Major in his firing line, for his statement that ‘we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less.’ An ‘epitaph to a brute culture’, he calls it. Not even his worst enemies would believe John Major is a ...”

“... how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon office, or the ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... been delighted to afford it him. Instead, his post-conflict life was the strange half-world of Shaw and Ross, a couple of flaunted incognitos worn during his days as a ranker. They have fascinated posterity and produced a successful play from Terence Rattigan: but the thought occurs that whatever other driving psychological urge sent Colonel Lawrence ...”

“... problems’, encouraging cold air to ascend the leg while the stomach overheated (Shaw, of course, wore Jaeger knickerbockers); it survived all the efforts of the Men’s Dress Reform Party, four of whose fearless avatars are seen in a celebrated photograph on the cover of this book; it survived the hazards and vulgarities of mass-production ...”

“... these changes are localised and gradual that they are seen by some whites as encroachments. Shaw’s book on a Pakistani community in Oxford, for example, describes the hostile reception which evicted a family who moved onto a local council estate. Racial attacks, being less visible than fullscale communal rioting, are a ‘safer’ expression of ...”

“... They defend McQueen against charges of cruelty, misogyny and racism: the black model Debra Shaw appeared manacled and hobbled, the dancer Shalom Harlow was pelted by paint-spraying robots, models paraded on a constantly tilting floor in a re-enactment of a dance marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke the way a call ...”

“... and philosophy is due to any social pre-eminence, because many of these illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, men with no Celtic blood; nevertheless, the fact of feeling themselves to be Irish, to be different, was enough to enable them to make innovations in English culture. I believe that the Argentines, and ...”

“... later: the transformation of his life and career, thanks to the good offices of Pound and Harriet Shaw Weaver, the editor of the Egoist. Pound’s unstinting generosity on Joyce’s behalf – hectoring, cajoling, and finagling support – is well known. In late June 1915, Joyce, his wife Nora and their two children were forced to leave Trieste for ...”

“... boundaries. When Eliza Doolittle says ‘Walk? Not bloody likely! I am going in a taxi’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion she gives away her social origins by her choice of intensifier. When the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell said the line onstage in 1914 she tested the tolerance of London theatregoers to the limit: they paused, then laughed uproariously. A swear ...”

“... in the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ‘Utopia’. He read Shaw, Wells and Russell, and stopped saluting the laird (but not the doctor, the minister or the teacher) because he ‘contributed nothing to the community’ and wasn’t very intelligent: ‘There’s naething in him except what he puts in with a spoon.’ By ...”

“... like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and copy and paste ...”