“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... Harry Graham ruthlessness in the stories. The hyena which the girl wishes to take her place at the ball in her story ‘The Debutante’ is direct:       ‘You’re very lucky,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go. I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.’       ‘There’ll be a great many different things to eat,’ I ...”

“... all his senses, were engaged elsewhere. But he has no ties when they meet again at Laczok’s ball: ‘a moment passed before he was sure, because her distinctive flaring hair, her most recognisable characteristic, was concealed in a turban, which in turn was swathed in a voluminous dust-wrap which covered her neck and shoulders in thick coils, and a fine ...”

“... lives racked with need for the light, the lift, of a little hope – ‘A child throwing a ball straight up saw a bit of pale sky’ – preferred to present himself as someone whose needs were nobody’s business but his own. Yet his was, in fact, a need so harsh that it makes one ache even now to consider the sheer size of it. It was the need to ...”

“... His idyll was brought to a thunderous halt by his father’s death, struck down by a cricket ball. Cranborne, for his part, was a Cecil. His grandfather, Lord Salisbury, had, while prime minister, made his son Jim (Cranborne’s father) a minister – a piece of nepotism no other family would have contemplated. Cranborne was a lazy, hopeless student at ...”

“... woods, and Minnie is needed to stand by and help Moura his widow. There are two sons, Gareth and Philip, both gone to America. Years ago Minnie was engaged, or thought she was engaged, to Philip: but it came to nothing and her life has been empty ever since. So Minnie comes to a house dense with painful ...”

“... Alex plays roles: as nun-concubine to a monk on a Greek island; dancing outrageously at a charity ball in Washington; as ‘Empress and circus rider’ breaking up a society party in Sydney; as an enthusiast making a tramp into ‘the Mystic’; as Sister Benedict on a nuns’ picnic humiliated by ineffectualness when another sister, ancient and ...”

“... slip. Day Lewis, it was predicted at the time of his appointment, would be much more on the ball. After all, had he not been limbering up for this honour for some years, with his clubs and his committees and his suave, actorly ‘recitals’ of gems from our poetic heritage? At my school in the Fifties, a regular item on the assembly song-sheet was a ...”

“... a vivid recollection of Herman Roth’s near-fatal attack of peritonitis in late October 1944 when Philip was ten. He was saved by sulfa powder, newly developed during the early years of the war to treat battle-front wounds. But it was a very close thing and the revealed mortality of his father during the height of his Oedipal conflict affected Roth ...”

“... were replicas in wax) sat without losing a smile or drumming a finger for hours on end. ‘Prince Philip smiled at me,’ gasped and groaned the presented in the flux of raspberry taffeta, forearms in a roly-poly of white buttoned kid. My presenter, the wit and author Violet Wyndham, daughter of Ada Leverson, author of The Little Otleys and Love at Second ...”

“... Women’s football ‘still gets attacked like no other sport’, Wrack writes. ‘Picking up a ball and heading to a patch of grass violates everything society expects of women.’When Wrack began writing a regular column for the Guardian in 2017, England had one of the best women’s leagues in the world. The national team, which had reached the ...”

“... the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where Now will probably hold one of the following: teenage girls making promises or taking ...”

“... this stuff and roaring with larffter since i was 11 yrs old’ (which, if nothing else, endorses Philip Hensher’s assertion in the introduction to this edition that those who attempt to imitate Molesworth’s style always ‘come a cropper’). Hensher, too, at ‘inexplicable moments’, has had to ‘lay down Down with Skool! and cry with ...”

“... become known as the ‘Conservative century’? This is the claim which Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball advance in the wide-ranging and thought-provoking volume which they have edited. ‘Either standing alone or as the most powerful element in a coalition,’ they write, ‘the party will have held power for seventy of the hundred years since 1895.’ It’s ...”

“... put Mary McCarthy on the spot. Jarrell himself discounted this, claiming hardly to know her: but Philip Rahv at Partisan, who knew her much better, politely declined to print any of the novel, and Jarrell replied by sending him no further articles or poems. Gertrude is certainly his idea of the archetype of the American woman writer, and in this, as with ...”