“... whether respecting himself or others. In his own case he has to cope with his biographer Andrew Field, his commerce with whom deteriorates swiftly and with cause, from the co-operative to the adversarial, to the point where, by 1973, Nabokov is telling one of his Russian correspondents: ‘His version of my life has turned out to be cretinous. I have had to ...”

“... is about. The salvationist strand to design on the Underground is nothing new. It goes back to Frank Pick, the Yorkshire puritan and businessman who imposed modern aesthetics and a measure of uniformity on the maze of private lines brought together in 1933 as London Transport. Pick also did a great deal of straightforward management, but his name is always ...”

“... that then ruled the Arsenal changing rooms. Adams’s treatment of Bergkamp is nothing if not frank. His first serious reference to him is to note that he refused Adams’s offer of help with his fear of flying (a fear Adams shared) – ‘it didn’t seem like he wanted any help at that time.’ His second is to report the telling of home ...”

“... herself a ‘woman photographer’ and had little to do with other women working in the same field. Some of her closest relationships were with women, and yet her behaviour was often dismayingly competitive, at least as soon as any possibility of sexual rivalry arose. For instance, she backed a photograph she had taken of the wife of a close friend ...”

“... this is current Victorian usage because Thackeray was a Victorian. Surtees’s love of the hunting-field and stable raises other complications. There is no doubt that a novel like Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour reflects a range of the horsey slang used by men among men. But, funny as the expostulation is, can one accept as plausible the ‘hard-swearing’ Earl ...”

“... exercise), and the clues he offers come right at the end of the book, by which time, to be frank, our interest in the question has flagged. Brought up in the comfortable affluence of his family hotel, showered with love and gifts, and urged on (but not unpleasantly) by his parents’ vicarious hopes, he grew up a ‘crown prince’. Graduates of the ...”

“... the word processor to marshal his text, the computer to prepare distributional maps, and trained field-workers – 80in all – to go forth and gather information, the sheer slow-budging burden of such a work is almost as cumbersome as it would have been in Joseph Wright’s day. The central corpus of data has been furnished by informants responding to a ...”

“... Company knew next to nothing of the country where they were posted, and so had no immunity to the field-canteen culture of the American Army. ‘When they arrived in Vietnam, they went along with what they found, partly because they were scared, partly because they didn’t know any better, and partly because no one told them differently. The war culture that ...”

“... all restrictions relating to sex, so making possible the current explosion of pornography and frank talk in the media and the home. Second, it significantly reduced the role of the marriage-bonded family. It made sexual cohabitation socially and morally acceptable as a stage prior, or as an alternative, to formal marriage; and it caused a change in both ...”

“... turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been drinking hooch and stuffing himself with junk food, and is sick on Sinatra’s shoes at the climactic moment of the game. Hoover ...”

“... the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but showed us is possible’. Louis-Jean ...”

“... doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another standard work, Die Herren Journalisten (2002), by Lutz Hachmeister and Friedemann Siering, who conclude that Zehrer ‘did everything’ to push the Nazis into power. As Ossietzky wrote, he ‘out-Hitlered ...”

“... So​ I have sailed the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a university that began life as a plant-breeding institute, and before that a railway-and-turpentine camp glued to a pine swamp in Florida,’ as Lauren Groff and I (separately) have done, perhaps a dozen years ago in her case, more than two dozen now in mine ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”

“... out disputes at the Poetry Society. Neo-Georgian versifiers and poetry-fancying grandees like Field Marshal Wavell began to mobilise against her after she took control of the society’s magazine in 1947. Both then and during her subsequent explorations of freelance life with Derek Stanford, a boyfriend and collaborator who became one of her major ...”