“... in Haddam, a town ‘as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant’, where ‘tall, white-haired, razor-jawed old galoots from Yale with moist blue eyes and aromatic OSS backgrounds’ run the local show. ‘If you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and Richard Ford would shake their heads ...”

“... Thomas, he was an eager perpetrator of New Romanticism. Watkins was at Repton and Cambridge with Christopher Isherwood, and makes a cameo appearance as the gullible Percival in Lions and Shadows. Nevertheless, he had little in common with the Auden generation or with Cambridge. His last eighteen months at school were, in retrospect, an idyll, but the course ...”

“... is to be gained by talk, particularly if it is stuffed with slogans about reductionism and holism. Christopher Wills is completely secure with genetic theory, and makes no attempt to belittle the beanbag model. The Wisdom of the Genes, a generally admirable book, suggests how modern genetics is leading evolutionary biologists away from the beanbag model, to ...”

“... wave away the menu and say: ‘No oil, no salt, no MSG, no colouring, no flavouring, no sugar, no white flour, no butter. What do you have?’ After the murder, with the newspapers running stories about the hunt for the ‘wolfman’, he starts eating piles of junk food. He also starts wandering around Chicago dressed as a woman, looking for a way of getting ...”

“... was any different. There, in its portable transparent box, was the earliest relic of the Book. In Christopher de Hamel’s history, the Rylands fragment is reproduced life-size in the final chapter: life-size but not, to my faulty memory at least, very true to its actual appearance. In the reproduction the papyrus is a kind of drab olive; in the Rylands, with ...”

“... one at that. (When Ellen Terry suggested that she might defy convention and wear black rather than white in Ophelia’s mad scene, it was pointed out to her that only one character wore black in Hamlet, and it wasn’t Ophelia.) As a manager, he was dictatorial in rehearsals, favoured state censorship but excoriated the idea of subsidy, increased the size of ...”

“... remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at ...”

“... he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.’ Christopher Hitchens borrows Schippers’s scornful punch line for the title of his own screed against the President. Unperturbed by his proximity to right-wing Clinton-bashers like Schippers, Hitchens mounts a relentless and often compelling attack from the left ...”

“... but in an uneasy and nightmarish way. A technical decision – to paint with pure colours on a wet white ground – determined the look of the bright and detailed (as against the dreamy and clouded) kind of Pre-Raphaelite picture. Painfully brilliant carmines and greens; square yards of turf or river bank reproduced near life-size, leaf by leaf and flower by ...”

“... of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book is the most imaginative re-creation yet made of the poet’s daily physical being, and the photographs of the poet at all ages, from early manhood and ...”

“... you borrow Emily’s Wordsworth you will not read Wordsworth but Emily’s Wordsworth,’ Antonia White said. ‘She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she flings herself upon and passionately possesses a work.’ Wesley described Coleman as ‘larger than life, her enthusiasm boundless, her laughter a marvel, her appreciation and ...”

“... loosely under the command of a Sergeant Stacey Koon, from the local Foothill Division. Koon is white, as were all the twenty-five or so LAPD men who had also been drawn into the pursuit and who stood around to watch what would happen. The CHP officers, whose jurisdiction is limited to the freeways, were sidelined while four of their comrades in blue ...”

“... Kettle’s Yard – they in turn patronised other artists. To their house in Cumbria they invited Christopher Wood, who hadn’t managed to sell much, though Winifred, never less than enthusiastic, said of him: ‘Here was England’s first painter. His vision is true, his grasp real, his power is life itself.’ Ben and Kit would go out walking together with ...”

“... the heroine, is in. She does not talk much and she feels like a fantasy figure. Only the scenes in white-ruled South Africa are presented naturalistically. The lusus naturae of the title seems to be Hillela, not apartheid. For one-third of the book, Hillela is living in South Africa or at boarding-school in Rhodesia, under the care of her two aunts, for her ...”

“... burning, by thinking instead of Noel              asleep, In some cool room ... One white hand on the white Unrumpled sheet. One could see all this as typical of a brief Late Victorian interlude in sexual history, when professed emancipation co-existed with still-effective female chastity – the flirtatious ...”