“... an elaborate narrative in which a First World War veteran’s corpse is stolen by a couple of young friends who return it for proper burial to his people in the Australian outback. The combinations of contemporary vignette, ritual intensity and topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and ...”

“... who insisted on being identified), but the key facts are the same. Essentially, it involves the young Owen taking a job as a navvy during his university vacation in the autumn of 1956, and discovering that the good old British working chap is pretty patriotic and doesn’t take kindly to being shoved around by wogs like Colonel Nasser. He records that ...”

“... and vulnerable object cross the Channel – looks to have been done no later than the mid-1480s. Kenneth Clark even thought Leonardo might have brought the panel with him from Florence to Milan (though this cannot be right). Let’s say it was finished by 1485. Then something went wrong between Leonardo and his patrons. The picture was originally intended as ...”

“... to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that relationship last?Taylor wades deep into the cigaretty fug of that small literary circle awash with till-boredom-do-us-part love affairs conducted in rented accommodation. (The love affairs were usually shorter than the ...”

“... Infante deserted the island where he had come up against the same contradictions as today’s young artists. Now the master punster, author of the splendid Three Trapped Tigers, reappears as the scourge of the mendacious or gullible Castro-lovers who, in his view, dominate the free world. It is of course necessary to dispel the crasser myths and the ...”

“... mismatch of Abbott and Costello and closer to the exasperated camaraderie of Laurel and Hardy; as Kenneth Tynan put it, they were ‘no longer comic and stooge, but egoists in more or less equal competition’. They still told jokes and performed in sketches that required only caricature-acting, but now their roles were blurring to the point at which they ...”

“... her shoulders’, walked the streets crying ‘four bunches a penny’; and mudlarks, principally young boys, girls, old men and many old women, who spent the day with ‘their trousers tucked up, groping about picking out pieces of coal, iron, wood and copper nails’ from the mud on the banks of the Thames. Unlike the street-sellers, whose lives were ...”

“... he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the biography by Kenneth Rose, makes little mention of the bons mots, but some of them exist in what Curzon would have cringed to hear called the popular memory. ‘Gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon’; ‘Dear me, I never knew that the lower classes had such white ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”

“... he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed Rev. Gerard, as his Mr Murdstone, the icy cheeseparer who darkens his world after his adored mother’s death when he was 12. You can smile at the cunning which colours his boyhood ...”

“... surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has always been profoundly conservative (hence its popularity, up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers ...”

“... almost all her subsequent books would be), describe a deeply unfamiliar world: ‘When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me. You will say there is nothing out of the way in this.’What is impressive is how fresh and undated this, and all ...”

“... says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House ...”

“... More than three hundred African political and trade union leaders were in attendance, including Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda and Frantz Fanon. The number of women delegates was small, but Eslanda Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maida Springer and Marthe Ouandié made sure some of their concerns were addressed. The conference was chaired by Tom Mboya, a ...”

“... from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New York salonnier of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, who shamelessly made sure his name was associated with those he helped. Thayer had some literary ...”