“... happy and proud to have been given the chance to serve beside him.’ The comrade-in-arms here is Richard Ingrams, with whom Waugh is now serving on a new journal called the Oldie. Ingrams, we learn from a recent interview, also has a father-problem. He told Lynn Barber that ‘he could not have worked for Private Eye if his father had been alive, because ...”

“... one witness had claimed greatness for Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ How, then, is one to take Richard Hoggart’s opening assertion to the Defense Counsel: ‘I think it is a book of quite exceptional literary merit, probably one of the best twenty novels we have had written in Britain in the last thirty years’? It is universally acknowledged that ...”

“... educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by Richard Titmuss at the LSE, free therefore of the resentment, deference, fantasy and fear which drive a large part of the rest of the profession, he has an innocent energy in the face of what he once called ‘the chipped white cups of Dover’ which has carried ...”

“... through the battlefield: from early years with Rex Ingram at the Victorine Studios in Nice, stills photography, quota quickies as a director in London, the unwelcome coming of sound, the breakthrough engagement with Korda and the meeting with Pressburger. He has a bewildering recall of facts and names which makes the randomness of the index all ...”

“... The judge also asked the jurors if any of them were reading any book. Only one said he was – Richard Wright’s Native Son. When it came down to cutting the jurors to eight, the one person who said he was a book reader was discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote ...”

“... her relationship with the world. Rose is too practical to expect a revelation, but she’d like a nice time, and doesn’t see why everything can’t make room for that. Harold is proud of his camper van and spends quite a bit of time feeling resentful that Rose is in it with him. He is unhappy to begin with and nervous at the prospect of an unspecified ...”

“... or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The rector, Richard de Folville, was eventually dragged from his church by armed men and beheaded on the spot. ‘The records reveal so many thugs in holy orders,’ Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... talked to anyone in the past week or so who doesn’t believe that this was and is true of Richard Gott. I don’t say this with any sense or intention of accommodating to the prevailing wind, since Gott has disliked me intensely for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once ...”

“... Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom were very nice to him, as was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go for Gump. Usually, success is everything and brings everything in its train, but the idea ...”

“... up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in each conceited anecdote. Of the White House staffers who did not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two – Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and ...”

“... of a great seaport. Previous literary exiles had included Stendhal, Charles Lever and Richard Burton. In addition, Trieste had its own literary world: Futurism flourished there, Marinetti visited frequently and contributed to local papers, and Joyce’s pupil and friend Ettore Schmitz would later – encouraged by his teacher – become famous as ...”

“... reinterpretation whenever the hive challenged conventional wisdom. An early 17th-century expert, Richard Remnant, contended that beekeepers could use their knowledge of queen bees to control women. Butler was forced to accept the existence of the queen but frothed: ‘Let no nimble-tongued sophisters gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In ...”

“... to get me off her hands. She wrote once or twice later to say that she was going out with a very nice Italian in the restaurant business. The picture told of a tall, dark man in his thirties, smiling at the camera with my mother behind it. In another letter she asked if I’d had any Valentine cards. She’d had ten. No, I said. I hadn’t had ...”

“... with any people upon mean conditions; if you will entertain this virgin, you must act upon the nice principles of honour and without any respect to parties – if this is not observed, credit will not come; no, though the Queen should call; though the Parliament should call, or though the whole Nation should call. When Daniel Defoe, the world’s first ...”