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“... these people with words and will not let them breathe. The self-depreciating asides (on a middle-class writer’s privilege and complicity) are only a little dated and anyway in line with expectations of this form of pastoral, but they sink the subject in a different way. So does a self-conscious literary motif which crops up in the dedicatory ...”

“... had been two branches of the Peels in Halifax, both with mills, and that at the time of the Boer War the run on cloth for uniforms had tempted their branch of the family, her grandfather possibly, to invest in new machinery. With the end of the war came a slump and for them bankruptcy, while the other, less enterprising ...”

“... created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian third. Their Belgitude, which they celebrate when the ‘diables rouges’ are playing in the World Cup and disdain for royal weddings or the king’s Christmas message, is part of a modular ...”

“... Early in 1947 Simone de Beauvoir made her first trip to the United Sates. The Cold War was beginning and, like Sartre, Camus and the rest of their circle, she was searching for a third-camp alternative to Stalinism and American imperialism. Beauvoir was drawn to the United States for other reasons, anticipating, as she put it at the beginning of America Day by Day, the chronicle of the journey that she published the year after she returned to France, ‘a world so full, so rich, and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me ...”

“... of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second World War made a more coherent framework essential and the emergency powers in this statute provided it. That they were then considered to be of a temporary nature was made clear by section 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date ...”

“... majority of those remaining are probably not of Lithuanian origin anyway and came after the war.) Yiddish – along with Polish – had been the language of Vilnius and Kaunas; it is heard no more. Nothing remains of Heshel’s synagogue, nor of his father-in-law Rabbi Zvi Oppenheim’s in Kelme. (There were two thousand Jews in Kelme in 1941; there is ...”

“... 10 January. Listen to a tape Ariel Crittall has made about her life at the request of the Imperial War Museum. She remembers meeting Unity and Diana Mitford off the train in Munich on the morning of the Night of the Long Knives and Diana saying: ‘What bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’ Ariel’s language is a joy ...”

“... Anglo-American models – was launched from that particular quarter just as the eminently middle-class traditions of the BBC’s Radio 3 were being challenged, and methodically subverted, by commercial radio in the shape of the newly established Classic FM. It was largely thanks to that ‘upstart’ station and the expertise peculiar to its commercial ...”

“... a speech in Birmingham claiming that when he was at school ‘more than half the children in my class never had any boots or shoes to their feet.’ He did not mind leaving the impression that he himself had been in the unshod or clogged half, if half it was. We know for a fact that he was much fussed-over as a lad, and that his school was by no means of ...”

“... the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was ...”

“... we will pick up, so to speak, some other writers from the centre of our city and visit the war memorials.’ Even on the short journey to the motel one detects the difference in atmosphere between here and Moscow. There we had scarcely seen a slogan and Sue thought that even the pictures of Lenin were not as common as a few years back. Here he is very ...”

“... out destruct end all the representations which exist for purposes other than enjoyment. In such a war, a war against idolatry, ridicule’ll be our best tool. Remember, whore: Julien’s sarcasm did more damage than Nero’s tortures.’   ‘Decomposing flesh moves me the most,’ the young whore said. ‘Give me ...”

“... on leave in December, and they were married by special licence on Christmas Eve. During the war Agatha worked first as a VAD, then as a dispenser in the hospital at Torquay. In September 1918 Archie was posted to London; a daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1919; and in 1920 Hercule Poirot made his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Two ...”

“... us with a box of tricks uniquely guaranteed to ensure permanent prosperity. When the long post-war boom, of which he was allegedly the ‘onlie begetter’, was succeeded in the 1970s by the disconcerting phenomenon of stagflation, the devil theory caught on, whereby Keynes was in turn arraigned as the architect of our misfortunes. A further variant was to ...”

“... at the beginning of the 11th century by a Japanese court lady. The novel is twice the length of War and Peace, and no generation of writers in Japan has been able to ignore it. Genji has been admired, attacked and imitated, some ten thousand books have been written about it and countless articles dedicated to it in the past 950 years. We know from the ...”