“... certain reputation, occasional brushes with high life and lengthy diaries and letters filled with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage that he is still widely read. Penguin keeps all the novels in print, though none of the biographies. Reluctant to give all the details, they allow that Decline and Fall is the top seller at about ...”

“... last line would a century later ineluctably evoke the Monty Python song about the highwayman ‘Dennis Moore, galloping o’er the moor’: Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Mr Moore. None of Micaela’s odd childraising methods, which included dressing Mercedes up as a boy, telling her her ...”

“... from grave to cradle.’ 6 April. Were there a suitable forum I would put in my own word for Dennis Stevenson, currently being pilloried with his colleagues for the collapse of HBOS. In the early 1990s when I was a trustee of the National Gallery Stevenson was a trustee of the Tate and must have seen me arriving at one or other of those institutions on ...”

“... whom she had a close working relationship. (Just one of her later novels has been translated, by Dennis Washburn: Laughing Wolf, a tale of two itinerant children travelling through postwar Japan, published in 2000.) In her early work, Tsushima often wrote about the world of young single mothers – a world she knew. The pages are full of the demands of ...”

“... words, of life on Mars at one time, even if not now. When they made the announcement there were sharp intakes of breath in space science departments everywhere. (Altogether, 12 meteorites have been identified as bits of Mars, chipped loose in a bygone catastrophe – a collision with something big, like an asteroid or comet – which had spun around the ...”

“... was like splitting the atom – it had done something to the sky, to our perception of time. Sharp-edged shadows were printed into the asphalt. This special quality of the light teased phallic clusters of lenses; engorged telephotos could be displayed without embarrassment. The merely curious, the event junkies who read this day as a living ...”

“... three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and ...”

“... distrust her and resent her constant visits. She complains bitterly to her mentor, the Reverend Dennis Hasset, about the power of men; when he understandably looks puzzled – he’s quite unable to cope with her energy, and her innocent defiance of convention helps to ruin him – she explains impatiently that it’s the power ‘of men, men in a ...”

“... pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all these gambits seem to have been practice runs for the ...”

“... that makes them oddly available to the poet. In another monologue here, Thwaite makes George Dennis, Consul at Benghazi and a passionate antiquarian, open with words that form a splendidly resonant though decorous conceit for the poetic process itself: Rich bronzes, figured vases, jewellery – Fruits of my labours, subterranean joys: My men sit round a ...”

“... if this were true) should look in particular at her straight expository prose, which has the clean sharp efficiency of a first-rate mind. Teacher was completed about 1953 and for ten years Ashton-Warner tried unsuccessfully to have it published in New Zealand. Spinster was written in part to give fictional form to her account of how she had found ways of ...”

“... Geoffrey Wawro’s The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-71 (2003) and Dennis Showalter’s The Wars of German Unification (2015). All of them foreground the predicamental character of military situations, their constant emergencies, and the contingency and pressure of decision-making. Howard, who took part in the Allied landings at ...”

“... and sensible speech on the Middle East – such as Governor John Connally in 1980 – is taught a sharp lesson. Jewish Americans make up only 2.7 per cent of the population of the United States, but partly because of their concentration in some pivotal states and mainly because of their influence on the American media and sections of American business, they ...”

“... There are some nice bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely ...”

“... But then the whole book is astonishingly free from scorn or condescension; even the preposterous Dennis Boaz (writer, lawyer, hippy, changer of his own mind but of no one else’s) is acknowledged for his intrepidity and for the directness of his speech on behalf of Gilmore’s wishes. A great many intelligent and sensitive things are said about respect in ...”