“... their ‘crafty mingling of accurate observation with metaphorical form’ to the work of Stanley Spencer. Motion is usually perceptive in his sometimes quite elaborate commentaries on paintings (looking at the reproduction of A Sergeant of the Light Horse, I wouldn’t agree, though, with either part of his verdict that it is ‘a masterpiece of ...”

“... out doing something that made him seem a bit déclassé. Bergonzi discusses Bloomsbury or Bennett, Wells or Wyndham Lewis, Davie or Fredric Jameson, in the same informed, unassertive tone; the most memorable essay is actually an attack on Terry Eagleton, but the manner remains moderate even as the shafts go home. Bergonzi has obviously made a bourgeois ...”

“... when she said yes. John Middleton Murry saw that when Lawrence went to a party given by H.G. Wells in 1914, it was with sickly determination that Lawrence insisted on evening dress. ‘Now Lawrence,’ wrote Murry, ‘who looked his lithe and limber self in many kinds of attire, did not resemble himself at all when locked into a dress-suit ... But ...”

“... break with one book – disc recordings for the archive were only set up for the very great, like Wells and Shaw, or for people absolutely assured of a permanent place in the history of English letters, like Sir Max Beerbohm and J. B. Priestley. Orwell’s privacy was not pathological, it was perfectly normal: but it makes things difficult for a ...”

“... to create a compensatory postwar cult of the southern English chalk downs, and also by Stanley Spencer, whose paintings of the Berkshire village of Cookham had much in common with Chesterton’s defensive advocacy of England: the smaller and more localised the better; the less your knowledge of the wider world, the more profound your experience is likely ...”

“... many of them held on Astor leases, the investment reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become ...”

“... paradoxes became central to Sickert’s practice. He was spurred on by friendships with the artist Spencer Gore and Pissarro’s London-based son Lucien, with whom he founded the Fitzroy Street Group in 1907 (this preceded the Camden Town Group, with considerable overlap of membership). He learned to establish the essential masses of colour in a picture before ...”

“... remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like the Vicars’ Close at Wells they turn out to be medieval. The church of course is medieval, too, with over the wall, and just visible in a traditional configuration of church and state, the manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of ...”

“... It was completely without running water. Pavey commandeered a food trolley from Marks and Spencer and set himself the task of pushing it around the sodden, cracked streets of central Tewkesbury, delivering hundreds of litres of bottled water to the aged and infirm, for no reward but thank yous. ‘All that week, when we ran out of water, I delivered ...”