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“... The day begins when she turns on the computer – ‘the musical chord that Macs play as they boot up pleases her, as always, like a little electronic dawn’ – and mealtimes are organised by e-mail: ‘it’s century 21’ after all. From the computer in the kitchen Lizzie sends a message to her son upstairs: ‘ “Hi. Dinner in 20 minutes when Daddy ...”

“... the poet to rhyme ‘deef’ and ‘Ypres’ within the first four lines – and internally to boot. Happily, Gray includes all of them in The Book of Prefaces, as well as the stirring Prologue to Piers Plowman. This is poetry which proves that powerful verse needn’t be politically puny and pusillanimous just because it alliterates, while demonstrating ...”

“... for a popular author-playwright, though not calculated to mould a literary style to please Max Beerbohm, who was to pursue him with curious venom. Jerome’s first book was a collection of sketches about the stage and then came The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (all his busy life he affected to be an idler). Having found his feet he married and Three ...”

“... fears nothing less than assassination if his true identity emerges. (In Steal Big the hero Max Patrick – NB ‘Patrick’ – is at risk from both the CIA and the Mafia.) It may well be a sales gimmick, but taking the blurb at face value one assumes ‘Patrick Mann’ gives nothing away to the author’s dangerous ‘contacts’. Yet one of the ...”

“... backlit by violent scenes. The children’s ‘most usual punishment’ was being locked in the boot room. Comyns didn’t mind this much but one of her sisters, who was claustrophobic, ‘broke the glass panels of the door and threw the glass at Mammie’, after which ‘there was a lot of blood and screaming.’ Comyns’s father once horsewhipped her for ...”

“... displays that promiscuously mixed types of distinction, squeezing ballet dancers next to bishops. Max Beerbohm remembered going as a child to inspect the London Stereoscopic Company’s ‘great long double window on the eastern side of Regent Street’ and realising for the first time that his political heroes, read about in the papers and cartooned in ...”

“... question: why then did he plump for the straight in/out choice? Just because he’d rejected devo max in the Scottish case was not a reason to reject it here. After all, in this case it was precisely what he wanted. Even Bill Cash, the most die-hard Eurosceptic of them all, had in 2011 advocated a three-way choice in any referendum: between stay, leave and ...”

“... be opened up to competitive bids from the private sector. The doctor and Daily Telegraph blogger Max Pemberton described it as ‘the day they signed the death warrant for the NHS’. Throughout the latest debate on the Health Service’s future, the Conservatives have praised it as an abstract concept, pledging to uphold ‘an NHS that is free at the point ...”

“... He was more careful, even sparing, with the rouge. For his hair he had a selection of Kiwi boot polishes in various browns. He blended these on the back of his hand, selecting a tone appropriate for the particular evening, and brushed them through his abundant hair with a shoe brush. He polished his teeth with Vim. He looked remarkably young even ...”

“... a front-line state in the Cold War, with a long history of hostilities with Russia to boot. So there was both a more pressing desire in Washington and a more pressing need in Ankara for a close understanding between the two than there was in the case of Madrid, and so for a better ideological and institutional alignment of Turkey with the ...”