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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... strict regime and easy fellowship recalled ‘the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men’ which Jones would celebrate in the preface to In Parenthesis as defining the early months of war. In the sensory corridors of his poem Jones would have much to say about ‘cushiness’ in the trenches, as make-do or make-believe, but ...”

“... there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print annotation, but the notes themselves contain a treasury of Eliotiana. There are a few very minor mistakes, but in scope, detail and quality of annotation this edition is utterly remarkable. Eliot also wrote much non-epistolary prose, and the ...”

“... Bob Smillie, a friend of the Orwells and the Orrs, died in detention; and the POUM, which – as Helen Graham shows in The Spanish Republic at War (2002) – never amounted to a coherent force in the first place, was a sorry footnote in the larger story of the Republican defeat. Charles Orr came to the conclusion that Tioli was in the pay of the ...”

“... that Benny Goodman, ‘The King of Swing’, recorded ‘Eeny Meeny Miney Mo’ (vocal by Helen Ward) shortly after the great ‘King Porter Stomp’ (1935)? Waller and his group typically recorded six or eight new numbers every two months. Often he’d see the music for the first time at the recording studio. A brilliant quick-study, Waller would set ...”

“... of Middle Earth, while Garner billets his pantheon (dwarves, trolls, elves, stromkarls) on a small corner of a county: Alderley is less than ten miles from Macclesfield and not much more from Manchester. The vengeful arrival of Nastrond, a variation on Sauron, is threatened but never materialises. The children’s ages aren’t specified, though ...”

“... his most sustained period in the USSR, from 1984 to 1987, was spent as economics counsellor at the small and highly efficient Swedish Embassy in Moscow. His main conclusions are these: first, that perestroika is the latest of a series of attempts to reform the Soviet economic system, of which the previously most serious was that undertaken by Prime Minister ...”

“... night to ‘have some fun’ with her too. Josephine had managed to attract the attention of two small boys in the street and they had helped her escape. She had been back at school for a day but all she could do was cry, she said. I told her I would send her mother to fetch her right away. Doris was almost hysterical when she heard the news but I bundled ...”

“... into an alien place – The god’s spume foaming in the prince’s hair – Where do you sail? If Helen were not there What would Troy matter, men of Achaean race? The sea, and Homer – it’s love that moves all things. To whom should I listen? Homer falls silent now And the black sea surges toward my pillow Like a loud declaimer, heavily thundering. As ...”

“... St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out on the grand scale, as though occupying some other part of the poet’s mind. ‘Again I ...”

“... hundred years ago I find absurdly satisfying. As I’m stroking this paint I become aware of a small child cowering in an alcove, playing hide and seek and who obviously thinks I am mad. On the hill south of the main buildings is the Applegarth, where there are two yew trees, unvisited by any tourists but survivors of a group of seven such trees that had ...”