“... under the table to run my fingertip over their convolutions. The table’s top is scrubbed white wood. The knots are like glass. I am comforted to think that next door at No. 58, our dog Rex is under the table, just like me. Peas flick from their pods into a white enamel colander, which has a thin rim of navy blue. The scent of inner peapod rises around ...”

“... commodity, the table has ceased to be, as Marx puts it, an ‘ordinary, sensuous thing’ made of wood. ‘It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.’ According ...”

“... without disadvantage or close it without loss. An account of the battle of Crécy, quoted by Sir Charles Oman, speaks of the French knights falling under a hail of English arrows, ‘almost without seeing the men who slew them’. This is exactly what Kelly means by ‘disconnectedness’. Killing ‘from afar’ has long been part of war. In Iraq and Kuwait ...”

“... and, in doing so, achieves a querulous irony. Worstward Ho – the title puts us in mind of Charles Kingsley’s stirring adventure yarn, and perhaps of Kipling’s boarding-school, model for Stalky and Co. Shorn of the exclamation-mark which gives a stirring emphasis to the Victorian adventure story (and the name of the Victorian school), Worstward Ho ...”

“... wing beneath, etc. A role Sadie plays as if made for the part: the Nick to Philae’s Gatsby, the Charles to her Sebastian, the Gene to her Finny: there is always the friend, Sadie knows, any freshman who’s done all her reading knows the narrator of the story is always the Friend. (Gene and Finny from A Separate Peace, ‘the wing beneath’ presumably ...”

“... of politics likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three ...”

“... of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it came to vernacular music, Tippett invariably turned to America. Ragtime jitterbugged through the last movement of his Piano Sonata No. 1, completed as early ...”

“... Waugh suspected that Greene had taken the idea of Scobie’s warped sanctification from the poet Charles Péguy, whose saying supplied the book’s epigraph: ‘No one is as knowledgeable in the matter of Christianity as the sinner, that is, except the saint.’ Péguy had made this ‘preposterous deduction’ as a morally erratic convert who needed to put ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... woods of oak and birch, and water meadows. The floors are oak. A handful of rooms are heated by wood-burning stoves, and it’s sparsely furnished. There aren’t many distractions: no internet, television, computers, phones, radio, electricity. It’s the early 19th century, after all. There’s nobody to talk to. Of course there are hundreds of people ...”

“... with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... London, during the Second World War, she was evacuated to her grandparents’ in Chorley Wood, ‘a safe place for a Jewish child in 1940s Europe’. After the war, her father never came back. The divorce was ‘loud’. Neither parent wanted Barbara and her younger sister, Ruth, so they were made wards of court. Her father later took his own ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... memoir-writing by the upper classes, remains first-rate. For much of the volume we are in a remote wood-chopping world, a species of Arcadia – though a far from innocent one – in which earth-shaking events do not intrude. Leacock, it emerges, first became a humorous lecturer to raise funds for the Belgians in 1914, but, apart from that, World War One (in ...”