“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life. [cut to]Herb: [pouring champagne] I feel like a sultan of Araby and my tent is graced with Helen of Troy.Joan: Those are two different stories. [cut to]Don: He’d just seen that unattainable object speed by out of reach. Because they do that, don’t they? Beautiful things. [cut to]Herb: [to Joan’s décolletage] You know, I don’t know how much ...”

“... National Park? Or flowers and shrubs? When in 1969 she started going to a therapist called Helen Boigon, the dark revelations she spewed out were, it seemed, endless, and made more so by Boigon herself spilling the beans to biographers in the aftermath of Arbus’s suicide. ‘At their first session,’ Lubow reveals, ‘Diane got down on the floor and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the next day’s media coverage would not be about our policing policies.’ It may seem like a small point, but by placing the quote marks there he changes the sense of what he said. It implies he thought she was somewhat bigoted. Yet he actually sounded like he was calling her the kind of bigot he knew all too well. It’s a tiny detail, and it makes all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unrest and in favour of rearmament, than Maclean’s Scottish section). The left remained a small minority: George Barnes, who won Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown in the 1906 election, was still the only Labour MP in the city during the First World War. ‘The world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John Buchan’s old Borders ...”

“... than Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost – the negative plaster life-cast of the inside space of a small room from an old home? It’s a pity Saatchi doesn’t have it out always. Among this body of work, Whiteread’s is in a class apart. None of my general reservations apply to it. But any categorical aesthetic gib – any argument about a whole kind of art ...”

“... They estimate it would include between three and four thousand people. ‘If the needs of that small group are not properly met,’ the Report says, ‘care in the community will be discredited ... We do not think that as a society we can afford to let that happen.’ The Mental Health Foundation, however, disagrees, largely because it thinks that such ...”

“... a distinctive philosophy expressed in a distinctive manner.’ In the most recent collection of Helen Simpson’s sophisticated stories about housebound wives, teenage girls and (above all) babies, a schoolgirl one spring day meditates on the poet: ‘Coleridge was a minefield. Just when you thought he’d said something really brilliant, he went raving off ...”