“... attitude to their fine furniture and irreproachable outfits; excessive patricianness also leads to Robert Lowell-style manic episodes and nasty yachting accidents. Third place goes to Boris by virtue of Russian soulfulness. Second goes to Theo’s mother, a scrappy woman from Kansas who funded an advanced degree in art history by working as a fashion model on ...”

“... are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of ...”

“... Arriving​ at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player ...”

“... crisis’ and not nearly so much of the ugly xenophobia seen in 2015. Despite anxieties about a winter of discontent – gas prices have risen sevenfold since the last cold season – we have yet to see the ‘riots’ predicted by Germany’s foreign minister earlier this year. The decision to make Ukraine a candidate for EU membership has given the bloc a ...”

“... shut, the books become lost to me, in the fear that I have been lost to them.It is a frugal winter. The jumpers are on and the heating switched off so I turn the pages with cold hands, which is a kind of nostalgia in itself.The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading ...”

“... the country lecturing to local branches of the Historical Association, and could pack a hall on a winter night for a topic like the Congress of Vienna or the Liberal landslide of 1906. The secret was, I think, that he talked about the kind of dry-as-dust history which for generations had bored children in school, but transformed it into a tale of the ...”

“... to any intelligent reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not about faith. It is unauthorised because it addresses ...”

“... have produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters ...”

“... quite possibly a prestige operation for East German cultural politics’. Eventually, in the winter of 1947, he and his books were freighted westwards, a prudent supply of alcohol and nicotine ensuring that he had no trouble with the railway authorities or the border guards. A year later he was called to Heidelberg. So much for the man, as he has ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... them in cleaving to the convention of literary tourism exemplified by Dickens, Frances Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and dozens of other British writers, for whom democratic, republican America presented an appalling and comic spectacle of unruly manners and institutions. For these, too, were out-and-back narratives: the place from which their authors ...”

“... recording their fashionable clothes, pink cheeks and languid arrogance. Some, like the master of Robert Burns’s ‘Twa Dogs’, had set out in a ‘frolic daft’ simply To make a tour an’ tak a whirl To learn bon ton and see the worl’. But the ostensible purpose of the Grand Tour – a term coined in the mid-century – was the completion of a ...”

“... Was there nobody more interesting? More talented? It’s as though Coleridge had stuck with Robert Southey and never met Wordsworth. Why should a writer such as Flaubert, always so fiercely self-assured in his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was ...”

“... business down, and he goes looking for a new line of work. Rummaging in a junk shop on a draughty winter morning, he comes across a dilapidated book. He steals it, reads it, and becomes obsessed. This book is the manuscript of Gould’s Book of Fish, which immediately announces itself as something special. Its binding emits a supernatural glow, and – rather ...”

“... carefree life of the street children who played cricket the whole day long during the idyllic winter months from November till March. One year, when my parents were abroad, I bunked off school for a week to play with the street teams. It was bliss, even though I wasn’t very good and knew the only reason I had been allowed to play was that I had a new ...”