“... he shows the Major the grounds, and after punishing a spaniel for killing a chicken by tying the bird round its neck, indicates a diamond-shaped bed of lavender: ‘“Planted by my dear wife.” After a moment, as if to clear up a possible misunderstanding, he added: “Before she died.”’ That evening, the Major looks out from the cat-filled bar and ...”

“... its emblem of the English countryside, surely this is it again, the ‘delicate grotesque silver bird’ on the De Morgan tile scavenged by the children from the mud in Offshore. The Pre-Raphaelite interest was profoundly, though obliquely, autobiographical. Fitzgerald had known Burne-Jones’s window in Birmingham Cathedral since she was tiny – it was ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... and English translation, ‘the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy’, Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and ‘any unflinching book on the World War’ – suggests that Salinger, whose forty-year silence followed its appearance, may have reached the same conclusion. But maybe not. Salinger’s enthusiasm for ...”

“... and she had a perfect mania for going to church.’ A few pages later she is described as ‘a bird of paradise that had been left out all night in the rain’. Constance probably didn’t know that her husband’s description of Sybil Vane in the novel has echoes in a letter to Lillie Langtry, unless it was the sort of thing he went around saying. ‘I am ...”

“... throw soft light on the poems. In ‘Poem’ she described a painting done by her great-uncle George, and suddenly realised that she knew the place he painted, she too had been there. ‘Heavens, I recognise the place, I know it!’ the poem reads. It is risky to use a word like ‘heavens’, especially if the poet is worried about being precious. The ...”

“... your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites … Oh my poor little parrot, fowl or bird, you have much to learn.’The narrative structure of A Legacy is tricky. Timescales jump around a bit, as does the dialogue, and the point of view, supposedly that of the little daughter, does what Bedford herself called ‘a Cheshire cat’, disappearing ...”

“... who were purged by Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill, certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The lobbyists gather like flies or vultures round Number Ten, because no other ...”

“... in company with his most distinguished European and American admirers (James, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Howells, the authorities in Oxford who gave him an honorary doctorate in 1879), read him largely in French or English. His importance for Western literature is unavoidably a mediated one, and it is through translation that we see what made those ...”

“... issue, an act of misreading. In truth, of course, Auden was innately as much of a moralist as George Eliot, and if he was drawn to the dream of poetry as pure play, then his ambitions were hopelessly compromised, like the Falstaff he described in a dazzling essay in The Dyer’s Hand (1962) – a collection of poet’s prose only rivalled in the 20th ...”

“... recruits, they were required to hold a Bible and take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, his heirs and successors. According to Joe’s army record, he was demobilised three years later with ‘good character’, and no medals to suggest that his intention was anything other than to stay alive.I sent a copy of Joe’s naturalisation ...”

“... in the making, but they are also becoming the objects of a new, obsessive field of inquiry, like bird watching, based on research and mapping, by an array of interested parties: interstate bodies, interior ministries, lobby groups, border control authorities, private security companies, think tanks, NGOs and contract demographers. The vigilance to which ...”

“... London has more of in a quarter of an hour than Boston in nine months; he begs everyone, as he did George du Maurier, ‘Do tell me everything that has, or hasn’t happened’ – and ‘everything’ includes even those subjects that in theory James isn’t much interested in, like politics and scandal. One of the most memorable and characteristic brief ...”

“... new circumstances. He is free to dream, the dreams surreal and disturbing. In Modern Love (1862), George Meredith captured the end of a marriage from the perspective of a number of characters in a sequence of 16-line poems. Poem XXV begins:You like not that French novel? Tell me why.You think it quite unnatural. Let us see.The actors are, it seems, the usual ...”

“... Some, like the Ukip farming spokesman, Stuart Agnew, and the Conservative farming minister, George Eustice, insist that, post-Brexit, domestic subsidies would continue to flow, and may even increase. Yet the official campaign, Vote Leave, has made clear that it’s ready to sacrifice farmers to contrive a bonus from Brexit for the country as a ...”