“... of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to ...”

“... me that she is one of the saints who multiplied in reliquaries after their death, to produce, as Ian Paisley’s website reminds us (in an essay called ‘The Errors of Rome’), the many prepuces of the infant Jesus, and the variously coloured hair of His madly trichogenous mother. Perhaps, in these days of cloning, or in future days of cloning, we will ...”

“... came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the ...”

“... at his story of how, on assignment in Jamaica covering Prime Minister Eden’s convalescence at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye (‘I knew the house because my eldest brother Shane’s widow was now married to Fleming’), he resolved to prevent a fellow correspondent making the disastrous mistake of marrying their hotel’s ...”

“... that women offenders are not ‘truly’ or ‘normally’ female. Take Myra Hindley. When she and Ian Brady were standing trial for the murder of three children, she was widely regarded as having been under the spell of Brady’s ‘magnetic’ personality. Shortly after their conviction, however, it became clear that Brady was seriously mentally ill. News of ...”

“... is also difficult for a League man to be swept along by the acclaim for Jonah Lomu, the giant All Black wing who cut a swathe through England with the certainty of a combine harvester. He has a commanding physical presence and speed to burn, but he may not be quite such a phenomenon in an arena where players’ livelihoods depend on halting him in his ...”

“... have grown up with the Waugh industry will find no major surprises: it is the familiar tale with black sauce. The editor’s warning that the letters should be read for entertainment not truth is perhaps superfluous. In this feast of irresponsibility she is ready to puncture with a neat footnote the more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away ...”

“... home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His ...”

“... and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of ...”

“... psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the mid-1970s, his ...”

“... matches being played with extraordinary speed and ferocity on the beach, most of the players black and beautiful, the supporters letting off bangers every time a goal was scored, and the bangers echoing against the apartment blocks and hotels. They played until it grew dark, and then another drama began. In her book Brazil, written with the editors of ...”

“... British colonists and Anglican clergy pitted against sixty thousand enslaved rebels and some free black Dissenting missionaries. Observers in Britain feared that Jamaica might be the next Haiti. It took a brutal counterinsurgency led by Sir Willoughby Cotton – ‘a veteran of Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and Belgium’, as Taylor describes him – to ...”

“... the expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. At that time, they had been a presence ...”

“... as one would expect from his 1970 admiration of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, with its black and white photography and its old-fashioned use of the shrinking iris to close a scene by picking out a detail: ‘The serious way in which circle-outs centre one’s vision on a detail of the image is also a kind of affection towards its objects, in stark ...”

“... been traced with such keenness as here. Of the young Hetty Johnson, Ehrenpreis says: ‘She had black, black hair and the enchanting gift of docility.’ The word ‘docility’ has gone hideously downhill, and the word ‘teachable’ has never risen above the unfeeling. The biographer can but do his best with such ...”