“... did about his job, it was one he enjoyed and which he did exceptionally well. The students may have been intimidated by him but he was popular with his staff and particularly with the women. Mary Judd, the librarian at the issue desk at Hull, thought that ‘most women liked him more than most men because he could talk to a woman and make her feel ...”

“... vague and characteristically harsh’, Spurling conjectures that with ingenuous good looks, he may have suffered from unwanted advances in a setting where homosexuality was not unusual. Certainly his main later complaint was the impossibility of any relation with girls, under vigilant bar by the authorities. There was also his lack of money for the lavish ...”

“... agitate for unification, Wales explores its relationship with England, Labour faces a split that may lead some of the party to an explicit embrace of extra-parliamentary politics, and Farage stirs the pot, the situation is unlikely to resolve itself any time soon. This has the makings of a full-blown constitutional crisis that the Conservative Party, no ...”

“... and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain, its thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... a back seat. The first lengthy testimony in the book comes from two men on that committee, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest ...”

“... both of them, Madeleine as much as Francis. That they were religious and interested in mysticism may explain part of it, but the fact that they were old and made clear their loathing for Ireland’s pieties is also significant. They were warm and deeply engaged with the world and with each other. Many of us came away from their house inspired and cheered ...”

“... from the settlement they imposed on it. Wilson, heading the strongest of the winning powers, may have had his flaws, like Tsar Alexander before him, but in Ghervas’s view is entitled to imaginative sympathy. He was no less moved than the tsar by high religious and moral ideals, which in his case found expression in the covenant of a League of Nations ...”

“... collective life. And always, however stertorous and philistine the previous century’s slumber may have been, it was dreaming most deeply of that future life, and throwing up premonitions and travesties of it. Once upon a time, what we call ‘education’ consisted essentially in interpreting dreams like these – telling the children about tradition, or ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... called Brutalism? ABK were thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland ...”

“... by a mountain of a man dressed in a jellaba. He tells me to hurry up the stairs – the briefing may already have started. Upstairs is a large room with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV ...”

“... decade, domesticity, cookery, paperwork, entertaining, trying to sew buttons,’ Bedford wrote to Robert Gottlieb, her American publisher, in 1986. Between 1956 and 1976, Bedford’s domestic situation had been fairly settled: cash injections from Gellhorn and Huxley’s second wife, Laura, a live-in relationship with Eda Lord, an American émigré ...”

“... beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade ...”