“... daring of her escape to London, where, with the help of a beloved governess, Helen Rootham, she took a flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater. Here she and Rootham lived on a grudging and uncertain allowance from Sir George, plus what they could earn. Thereafter, Sitwell was always short of money and as each generation passed she was left or positively ...”

“... compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to ...”

“... in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of exasperated marginalia – ‘vulgar’, ‘silly’, ‘you ...”

“... and eventually shopped her to the BBC, but a consultant from Belfast’s Mater Hospital, who took a career break shortly after her remarks were made. Selwyn Black has lectured in counselling at the University of Ulster, and his Christian background is that he has also worked as a Methodist minister and RAF chaplain. He specialised in the victims of ...”

“... newspapers we knew that Europe was the future; its parliament, if not exactly sexy, at least made John Major’s backbenchers foam at the mouth. And maybe Derrida’s trademarked ‘always already’, or Barthes’s writer who ‘can only imitate a gesture that is … never original’, spoke with more than usual force, in those end-of-historyish times, to ...”

“... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... King Canute has had a raw deal from history. He took his throne down to the beach in order to show his servile courtiers that not even a king could control the waves (that was in God’s power alone). But, ironically, he is now most often remembered as the silly old duffer who got soaked on the seashore because he thought he could master the tides ...”

“... Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The letterbox format was less suited to June Allyson’s face, but she did her best. She not only pouted in Cinemascope, she lisped in four-track stereophonic sound, flooding the auditorium ...”

“... the Cubans had done for the FNLA and helped to install the MPLA in Luanda, Unita slowly but surely took on the characteristics (and frightening strengths) of an ethnic movement, like Inkatha in South Africa or Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia. (Both Savimbi and Karadzic preferred to be addressed as ‘Doctor’. Perhaps it will be ‘Dr ...”

“... uncomfortable remarriage at the age of 60, his mean half-brother and the years of abandonment took their toll. He went back to live with his sisters and their husbands in the Armenian immigrant community of Watertown, Massachusetts, and thereafter made no effort to help his father, even through his final decline. In 1947, Sedrak checked himself into a ...”

“... pink rubber snakes, crucifixes, purple plastic grapes. Almost a year spent in such poverty that he took up panhandling seems to have enabled Brainard to see that anything could find its place in his rigorously constructed but ecumenical bric-à-brac shrines. One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by ...”

“... of Arc? ‘Know her? I went with her!’ And Robin Hood? ‘Lovely man. Ran around the forest. Took from everybody and kept it.’ Dietary secrets of long life? ‘Nectarines: a hell of a fruit. Not too cold, not too hot, you know. Just nice.’ Roy Walford, a gerontologist and immunologist in Los Angeles reckoned that both mice and men could substantially ...”

“... of becoming a Writer (and I thought of it in capital letters), so when Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of a literary life, or at any rate a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a ...”

“... presented himself at Oxford Police Station, he was asked to empty his pockets, and extracted John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.’ He was duly sent to the Isle of Man. There was a separate camp for interned Italians, and after a while the commandant took pity on the three professors in his care – the economist ...”