“... spent most time with Jim Reilly, who was in most respects like himself, from the Calton, with a small but persistent history of personal trouble left behind him. Some time, say in November 1940, my grandmother Molly received an undated letter from Liverpool, where Forfar was docked. It was the last contact she would ever have with her troubled young ...”

“... South, state legislators in the Midwest, unemployed manufacturing workers and the proprietors of small businesses. ‘When J. Pierpont Morgan, the patron of bishops and exalted pillar of the church, is at his devotions does he think of the starving miners who are suffering through his efforts and those of his colleagues at the coal trust?’ the ...”

“... his accommodation no more at this moment than he would in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming ...”

“... her principles and the breadth of her sympathies, she appears to have been, as her granddaughter Helen Pankhurst put it, ‘what we would now call an intersectional feminist’. Rachel Holmes’s new biography of Pankhurst rightly gives equal weight to the three great causes – feminism, left internationalism and anti-imperialism – to which Pankhurst ...”

“... is such that you are persuaded of its true reality.’ In The War of the End of the World, in Helen Lane’s translation (which the author, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, asserts ‘may be better than the original’), there is a sweeping confidence in the rhythms, a brilliance in the choice of detail and the analysis of motives; a wonderful ...”

“... a white T-shirt, an unbuttoned and untucked blue Oxford, baggy denim cargo pants, a necklace of small, white shells, through which he’d threaded a dangling pair of sunglasses, and an off-white baseball cap. He said: ‘I’m unemployed. So it’s not like I have anywhere else to be. I worked here two days last week, too.’ I said: ‘Wow.’ He ...”

“... This became what he grandly called the Bank of United States, and he grew rich on thousands of small deposits. His daughter Dora, Roy’s mother, would be remembered by various relatives as ‘the ugliest girl in the Bronx’, ‘mean, vicious, ugly and foul-mouthed’, ‘the nastiest person … she would make people wait on her, dominate them, and use ...”

“... much evidence had to be given about Tenducci’s sexual nature, including from a servant quoted by Helen Berry in The Castrato and His Wife (2012). He was a witness as the surgeon Pietro Massi castrated Tenducci: I clearly saw that … [the surgeon] made two Incisions between the Thighs, and the Body next the Groin, and when these two Incisions were made I ...”

“... Whale Cay beach in her will. A succession of other girlfriends came and went: Charlotte, Blanche, Helen, Jackki, Jorie and the exquisite Mabs, ‘a manicurist with a small green scorpion tattoo’. Several of Carstairs’s lovers were black, though none, as it happened, Bahamian: in her intimate life Carstairs preferred the ...”

“... was made interesting and anomalous by his writing’s absorption in the everyday, the small, the tangible and the banal. The exquisitely prolonged care that Proust, once Roussel’s near neighbour on the boulevard Malesherbes, lavished on describing the minutest ripples of the interior life are balanced by Roussel’s infinitely patient love of ...”

“... the entire UK stock market.Huang had a hard start in life. He arrived in the US in 1973 aged nine, small for his age and not speaking much English. His parents, Hokkien-speakers from Tainan who had emigrated to Bangkok, had attempted to teach him and his brothers English by making them learn ten words a day, chosen at random from the dictionary. They sent ...”

“... some of the celebrated critical spats he had been involved in, unyielding about the iniquities of Helen Gardner, generous about Empson though still irritated (‘Later in his life he made a great to-do about “matters of fact” in literature, but he so often got things wrong’). He had the usual nominal aphasia that comes with age, but uncannily sharp ...”

“... could have written Interwar. Unlike most historians, he has few scores to settle: he was the least small-minded of men. This last, huge, posthumously published work is a deflected portrait of the architecture of two decades when there was peace; unfinished at his death in 2017, it has been seamlessly completed by his widow, Rosemary Hill. In Interwar, Stamp is ...”

“... with Mephistopheles that makes grammar-school wet dreams a reality in the form of a fling with Helen of Troy; but instead of achieving world domination, Faustus dwindles into a showman who whiles away the time before his damnation providing harmless entertainment for kings and emperors. Piers Gaveston, who similarly enchants a king by ‘Sweet ...”

“... had to explain to the Sunday Telegraph why an attractively cast series of Easter week monologues (Helen Baxendale as a servant girl, Joss Ackland as Barabbas) was also consigned to the small hours: ‘It was felt that because these dramas are considered, thoughtful pieces, they suit the later evening slots when the audience ...”