“... fact. Xavier Herbert tried to meet size with size, insisting that his Poor Fellow My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail reader trying to manage it in bed – but a remarkable narrative, animated by an enormous will to do justice to its continental subject. My First university job ...”

“... designed, laid out and built between February and December 1915. It was largely the creation of Frank Baines, who had been a pupil of the Arts and Crafts architect C.R. Ashbee. He turned the wartime shortage of materials to his advantage, varying the construction and employing vernacular techniques such as tile-hanging and half-timbering. He gave historic ...”

“... what I recall a mite closer to the facts of the matter. Doris Lessing left behind two ex-husbands, Frank Wisdom and Gottfried Lessing, and the two young children of her marriage to Frank. Men do this all the time – desert the family, shall we say, in one form or another – but we assume, partly because of ...”

“... one to guess at more than the picture shows. Although you can’t generalise – Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach make pictures of ordinary North London without seeming to imply stories about the scenes they record – there is an English tendency to find the first impetus to picture-making in personalities and narrative, rather than in formal values of ...”

“... like paintings, objects of static contemplation. During the process, doorways open the way into, close off, give early, partial views of spaces and vistas. New, glass-fronted buildings that hide nothing don’t play that game. Yet even the frank display they seem to offer is a tease. Checkpoints and turnstiles lie beyond ...”

“... the Axis turned into a crusade to ‘roll back’ communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. One was Frank Wisner, a corporate lawyer who enlisted to work in naval intelligence early in 1941. When the US entered the war he was consigned to the tedium of the navy’s cable and censorship office in New York. Donovan rescued him from that backwater at the end of ...”

“... Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that only an ...”

“... imply anything, while seeming merely to pass the time of day.This is the sound of the bluesman Frank Hutchison, to whom Bob Dylan would return in 1993 for the version of ‘Stack A Lee’ (‘a romance tale without the cupidity,’ Dylan wrote) he offered on World Gone Wrong; it is the sound of drugstore speech in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1949; it’s the ...”

“... The second key pointer to the kind of government Tony Blair will lead was the appointment of Frank Field as the minister responsible for welfare reform. The Prime Minister has made it abundantly clear that he wishes to be remembered as the leader who confronted the swelling costs of welfare and reconstructed the benefits and pensions system to fit a ...”

“... different from what we customarily get under the heading of ‘spatial form’, a term that Joseph Frank coined many years ago in connection with the novel (Frank, incidentally, doesn’t appear in Moretti’s text or bibliography). Frank’s coining was essentially a Modernist ...”

“... an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement. Climax, but not end: in some country-house loft or uncleared bank vault, I would bet, lies the huge bundle which is the missing Johnson-Boswell correspondence. But that discovery, if and when it ...”

“... vocabulary. But almost the only thing we know for certain about aliens is that they don’t live close enough to see us pointing. We know of a handful of possibly habitable planets, but none is less than four light years away – or 24 trillion miles. And the Lunars aren’t that unlike humans: they’re tall but anthropomorphoid, and even claim to be ...”

“... the ridiculously overblown statue for the graveside scene in The Barefoot Contessa (it ended up in Frank Sinatra’s garden until one of his later wives made him throw it out). Even though her appetites were decidedly her own and even though she was happy to exploit the effect of her own fame and glamour, Gardner was unable to rise above Hollywood’s ...”

“... when the crowd turned against him.  Later, to a packed meeting of the parliamentary party. Frank Dobson was first up. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘the Lib Dems and the Tories have not abandoned party politics.’ There was, he alleged, a three-part strategy. When they had disposed of the Speaker, they would demand Gordon’s resignation. If they got ...”

“... that we turn away British army deserters from Northern Ireland, whose presence was sure to close us down. By this time, we had evolved a classically English accommodation with the various secret services who kept tabs on us: at one time or another these included MI5, Special Branch, the CIA, the FBI, US navy and army counterintelligence as well as US ...”