“... what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables them to buff up on their role as guides to the less discerning public. None of this, though, takes into account his sheer fun and his pleasure in (and exasperation ...”

“... to head, trunk and limbs. Versions of this silhouette are dispersed throughout the show, like little semaphore signallers or the cipher made of stick figures in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’. (Further messages: the ‘SOS’ of the show’s title; some dots and dashes of Morse code in the ...”

“... Ford maintained that prose ‘should give the effect of a long monologue spoken by a lover at a little distance from his mistress’s ear’. Such lines weren’t the only part of his output to be coloured by his famously well-populated love life, and Parade’s End draws heavily on his overlapping entanglements – principally those with Elsie ...”

“... top of the cliff in the early 1970s has gone: the cliff’s clay, sand, gravel and pebbles present little resistance to the force of waves, wind and rain – as Ellis points out, the corrosive power of wind-driven sand is quite something. I walked on that beach last year. The scene looks almost the same as the day the photograph was taken. But it really ...”

“... The man seems to be under the impression he is God’s gift to womankind,’ said Arthur. Cradling the enormous, rancid bunch of stock he had brought her, Mary reflected that the Holy Father could no more be depended upon to make an appropriate donation than any other representative of Hit sex. G.K. Chesterton, ‘Gabriel Gale and the Pearl Necklace’ Dundee, and the Magdalen Green ...”

“... in areas where higher-grade coal is available, because they produce a lot of smoke and relatively little heat (they are also difficult to transport and store, not least because they can spontaneously combust). Next comes bituminous coal, or steam coal. Dark brown or black, and usually layered or banded, steam coal is widely used in electricity generation (by ...”

“... of course, it was often more tetchy, but appearances were decently kept up. No one supposed that Arthur Balfour, that inveterate political animal, was weary of politics when he pulled out in 1911, as he showed by insinuating himself into most of the Cabinets formed during the next twenty years. Like-wise, Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative ...”

“... born of Boers. He was also, we soon realised, gay. After a while he introduced a young friend, Arthur, who came around with him and learnt his trade, devotedly watching Villiers as he fixed our errant Windows, e-mail and printers. One day Villiers let us down even more badly than usual and I was getting ready to fire him when I ran into my predecessor. You ...”

“... An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ...”

“... anatomists before entering politics), of his break with Lloyd George in 1921, when he joined what Arthur Henderson in 1917 called the long and interesting list of former ministers waiting to tell the truth about Lloyd George (Addison waited less long than Henderson), and, above all, of the origins and passing of the 1931 Agricultural Marketing Act. ...”

“... Willie Hopkin first caught sight of D.H. Lawrence in his pram, he thought him a ‘puny, fragile little specimen’. Forty-four years later the fragile specimen died, reduced by tuberculosis to a weight of 90 pounds. It is understandable, then, that Jeffrey Meyers should make much of Lawrence’s ‘lifelong invalidism’, and conclude his biography with an ...”

“... of stagflation, one is tempted to refer to a book by a distinguished US economist, the late Arthur Okun: Prices and Quantity, published a little before the Meade volume. Okun shares Meade’s preoccupation with the diversion of nominal demand into price and wages increases at the expense of output and employment, but ...”

“... beauty, and even if the translation by the American academic, Professor Seidensticker, conveys little of the flavour of Murasaki’s style, this text has none of the omissions and embroideries of the beautiful Arthur Waley version completed in the inter-war years. The various psychological dramas that evolve among these ...”

“... or at the shockingly brutal Northern ‘school’ where the hero is sent to die), and if he has little of Dickens’s generous sympathy or (consequently) humour, he is pretty much his equal as a documentarist. All the same, while reading The Quincunx I couldn’t help wondering what the novel would amount to – what would be left of it, in fact – if you ...”

“... made a will which disbursed sums that did not exist. In addition, Wilkes was a libertine. He had little or no religion, but an inclination for sexual adventures that lasted well into old age. In this respect, his apprenticeship was served in the Hell Fire Club, and he learnt his trade well. His life was all ‘blasphemy and bawdry’. Unlike some ...”