“... but the chapters themselves unassigned; my guess is that the survey of the queer scene is by Anthony Blond, also the book’s publisher. Its tone is both hip and cagey, totally au fait with bars, clubs and cruising spots that the writer cannot yet name: it’s a tantalising guide, innuendo just short of the really useful statement. On the north side of ...”

“... which dominated Beckett’s own household. They were bohemians. They gave parties at which, as Anthony Cronin noted in his biography of Beckett, ‘people sat on the floor and afterwards quite possibly slept on it.’ No one among the Sinclairs minded Beckett staying in bed all morning and having no worldly ambitions and many vague and high-toned ...”

“... held firm. By 2 March, the attack had been exhausted. Hossein Kharrazi was one of the last to cross a pontoon that had been thrown back across the marsh. As he went, his right arm was shot to bits. He shouted at the men ahead of him: ‘Go on! Don’t come back for me!’ At least twelve thousand Iranians were killed during Kheibar – the number may have ...”

“... I marry you.The embrace of the other person is haunted by the isolation it’s supposed to dispel. Cross rhyme (‘years’/‘bears’, ‘weight’/‘fate’) locks us into a fatalistic echo, as the beloved, brought close, becomes an almost unbearable burden. The clunky repetition of ‘body’ weighs down the lines, just as Schwartz imagined Gertrude would ...”

“... signed up for one, and on average only two-fifths of the people at risk do sign up. Besides, as Anthony Perry, flood-risk manager for Gloucestershire, explained, the key to the July floods was the water pouring off the Cotswolds, and the agency doesn’t give warnings for those small, nippy rivers. ‘The limitations are small watercourses, where they ...”

“... now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a learned and rhetorically gifted Stanford law professor. His argument before the Supreme Court not only saved his client’s life but irrevocably changed the history of the death penalty in America, if not exactly as he might have ...”

“... Union. It’s instructive to compare the account Moore gives of this fiasco to the one provided by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe in The Blunders of Our Governments, their litany of the cock-ups of the modern British state. Even in this exalted company – the Millennium Dome, the ERM disaster – the poll tax takes pride of place, ‘the blunder to end all ...”

“... together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No more Auden. I’m delighted that little shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’Auden’s elegy, ‘In Memory of ...”

“... which she described as ‘a juicy, overblown, exploding gothic lollipop’ and ‘an attempt to cross-fertilise Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Rousseau’. The story of ‘spiteful’ Marianne, the professor’s daughter, who leaves her father’s ‘white tower’ to run off with the Barbarians, its plotline is much the same as that of The Magic ...”

“... a hundred years. First, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which had long functioned as a cross between finishing schools for the sons of the landed classes and seminaries for the Anglican Church, were reformed. The public-school ideal of character formation took hold; ‘modern’ subjects, such as history, languages and science, were introduced; a ...”

“... run over. Every time we left the house, even in my adult years, it was: ‘Be careful how you cross the road!’ I was to nag my children in the same way. It is true that neither my sister nor I nor her children nor my children ever were run over, but the pressure has left me neurotically cautious about crossing the road. It also led to torture at ...”

“... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...”

“... astounded that others couldn’t recognise his all too familiar stuntmanship. He knew he had to cross the Hudson to find true believers, but the further into Duck Dynasty territory he ventured the more it felt like banishment to Queens. In winning he had not won. He couldn’t get over it. Nothing had changed for him since the interview he gave to Vanity ...”

“... the public about his character, particularly as he got older.They were deceived, though. When Anthony Thwaite published the Selected Letters last year the balance of critical opinion was disposed to overlook – or at any rate excuse – his racist and reactionary sentiments as partly a joke, racism more pardonable these days in the backlash against ...”

“... company hiring the house for filming. I told them about Battle Bridge Road, the place in King’s Cross where I lived in my twenties, which was used all the time as a film set. I told them about the day they were making a film about Oswald Mosley and doing the Battle of Cable Street in our street. The hippies who squatted nearby thought the revolution had ...”