“... of which Julian Huxley did not care to make public in his own Memories. Huxley crops up again in Anne Sebba’s life of the playwright Enid Bagnold, who as a young girl exchanged poems with him but dropped him when, in one of his letters, he tried to interest her in ‘the intimate interior arrangements of a frog’. During World War One she, too, had a ...”

“... Zandra Rhodes Victorian fantasy’, ‘an elegant Missoni knit dress’ and ‘a Thierry Mugler jump suit’. Arrival in the 16th century is signalled by a mistiness of documentation, a mistiness which may be intended to convey the quality of dream. Jessica notices ‘humble working people’ and ‘magnificently dressed aristocrats’. On the Rialto she ...”

“... take each day as it comes. ‘You mean,’ said Richard, the presenting Other Half, ‘don’t jump your fences before you come to them?’ I’m very hurt not to be on. Two hours later, I decided television was a vulgar medium. My editor rang up saying that I was going to be on World of Books, something far more highbrow. A few days later I was on TV ...”

“... to follow. Mew rarely sets up an image, or lets you settle in; everything proceeds by way of jump-cuts and her speakers are never at home, not even in their own memories. The poetry’s natural element is a charged interruption or hiatus. ‘And then she did not fly’: the thrill of large movements gives way to the bigger thrill of smaller ...”

“... which ‘extended over the void like a diving-board over a pool’, as though tempting her to jump. She leaves the building to follow a lead as to the whereabouts of her now absconded husband and his mistress, and finds herself – at night – in a part of town she doesn’t know. She enters ‘a vast courtyard … the walls studded with balconies, not ...”

“... through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ...”

“... only shared a part of Godard’s life but also played an important part in his work: Anna Karina, Anne Wiazemsky and Anne-Marie Miéville. MacCabe is reticent about the life. ‘Of the woe that is in marriage it is impossible to speak truly,’ he says of Godard and Karina. ‘All sexual relationships are ultimately private ...”

“... animals being slaughtered to those of the victims of the Holocaust, and of a steer being spared to Anne Frank being spared. They also suggest that there might be an equivalent of Yad Va Shem’s Avenue of Righteousness among the whales: ‘Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is a ...”

“... three index entries under Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made ...”

“... towards it, finding his mother on the floor. She hasn’t fallen, or not exactly: ‘“I tried to jump!” she screamed in anguish. “I tried to jump one last time.”’ The chapter ends there, but the scene hasn’t really begun – and if we found it easy to imagine the emotions of a fifteen-year-old boy trying to ...”

“... they fail the test of beauty so miserably? Why are these books with pink or sky-blue covers, which jump out at you like the incense in New Age bookshops, so ugly, and so stupid?Attention prickles and disobeys and Carrère overlays his past onto the room. ‘Forty- five years on,’ he writes, ‘I can’t quite separate in my mind my Cinquième teacher ...”

“... some humour in the stories. KB: In that sense, I didn’t feel there to be that much of a jump between What we talk about and Cathedral. But maybe Cathedral is more explicitly hopeful. RC: I think it is. The stones in Cathedral, most of them – well, some of them anyway – are finally more positive, more affirmative, than the stories in the earlier ...”

“... Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share. But its Conservative MP, Anne Main, is strongly pro-Brexit, and I was curious to see which way people are likely to jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian ...”

“... the target’s target, the loved one’s love. I find a description of all this, surprisingly, in Anne Carson’s study of Greek lyric poetry, Eros the Bittersweet: Possibilities are projected onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick ...”

“... and knew he had bound himself in his own mind so tightly to the German mast that he would never jump ship. Quisling’s last visit to Hitler in January 1945 began with the usual mad drafts of peace settlements and European pacts; but it ended, more realistically, with Quisling asking for extra side-arms and ammunition for his personal guard. By now Norway ...”