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“... as much impact on neurotic symptoms as distributing menus would have on hunger during a famine. A page or so later, in a characteristic complicating move, Freud suggests that the ‘clumsy treatment’ offered by amateur psychoanalysis, the equivalent of handing a menu to a hungry person, nevertheless probably does more good than not letting the person know ...”

“... the lead book review, the lecture series polished up for publication, the heavyweight foreign-page reporting in the Observer or the Sunday Times. On that scale, he produced his best and most influential work, launching challenges and controversies that permanently altered interpretations of the English and European past. In his abandoned books, he would ...”

“... book, penny chapbooks, an agricultural manual and an old book of essays that had lost its title page. He acquainted himself with ‘Mathematics Particularly Navigation and Algebra, Dialling, Use of the Globes, Botany, Natural History, Short Hand, with History of all Kinds, Drawing, Music’. He never studied ‘Grammer’, and always expressed a dislike of ...”

“... how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs Ransome’s book weren’t names at all. The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of ‘parenting’ and ‘personal interaction’, of ...”

“... with no prompts, straight into their faces, in a word-perfect articulation of the printed page. No fumbling with sheets of paper, no mumbled apologies – the business. There’s been nothing in the annals of performance art to match this tension since Jack the Hat barracked Dorothy Squires in the same gaff, back in the Sixties. The dump was known ...”

“... Melodrama in Three Acts’. The taxonomy of The Dance of Death, unclassified on its title page, though indicated within, was endorsed by Harold Hobson in 1933 as ‘that most frivolous of entertainments, the musical comedy’, here transformed into an instrument for serious drama, ‘as though one were to see No, No, Nanette taken, without ...”

“... novels of Sartre and Camus. Despite the echoes of Evelyn Waugh, of Beckett, of Larkin and Alan Bennett, these seem to me to be the real precursors of Mr Phillips. Lanchester’s new novel, in other words, is that hitherto unthinkable, almost absurd thing, a great English Existentialist novel. Nostalgic rather than loathing of Englishness, as The Debt ...”

“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of ...”

“... did then, and do now, choke back my tears,’ he says in one poem. Another talks of the page he’s writing on being smeared with ‘self-examination’s grudging tears’; in a third, ‘Isolation’, he depicts himself resisting tears three times after his mother’s death until he hears his father ‘bleat/round the ransacked house for his long ...”

“... explores the filiations between the Chilean ‘experiment’ and such Thatcherite figures as Sir Alan Walters and Robert Moss. In the course of his inquiries, he almost incidentally explodes one false claim, which is that Thatcher’s tenderness for Pinochet arose from his ‘helpfulness’ over the Falklands/Malvinas War. This is a canard, sometimes also ...”

“... of charm. ‘Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me,’ he wrote to Alan Schneider in 1956, ‘in fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.’ The occasion was the mortifying flop of the first American Godot, directed by ...”

“... review of Steps (1958), Graves sought poems which are ‘moon magical enough to walk off the page’ but was unable to ‘leave a poem alone when he had finished it’. Many poets combine the ululating shaman with the martinet who summons the howls of the shaman to order. But in few poets do those two voices shout at each other across the parade ground ...”

“... the feel of the Hobsbawm file, its heft. A PF is like a medical file: it starts with one flimsy page, and then, as the diagnostics proceed, its growth accompanies that of the disease it charts (another similarity is that the actual person becomes more and more abstracted). PF 211,764 weighs in at a thousand or so pages, collated chronologically as ...”

“... faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new vistas into the ...”