“... question were not Belgian but those of Cologne, rung to celebrate the German conquest of Antwerp. Arthur Ponsonby tells this story in Falsehood in Wartime, a book intended to encourage scepticism, but the reluctance to believe the worst merely because it redounded to the discredit of an enemy may have had the effect of delaying acknowledgment of what was ...”

“... for long, as we can’t look at the sun for long. The film was over. There was a silence. Then a young man said: ‘That was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in the movies.’ And they all said: yes. The most beautiful. The best performance. Who is she? What else did she do? This biography provides a comprehensive answer to that question. Note how ...”

“... composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of ...”

“... grandparents vivid memories of the hardship and degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have benefited from the post-war Welfare State and the Sixties expansion of higher education. (A typical product of that expansion, who was able to pick up qualifications casually and without exertion while concentrating his energies on rugby and ...”

“... recognisably connected with the minimalist and process music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and others. In Europe, on the other hand, he was famous almost exclusively for his operas: the most recent two had been commissioned in the Netherlands and Stuttgart, and all three had been premiered in Europe. His background was largely unknown.This was ...”

“... were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal figure of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the early years of the Cambridge English Faculty would greet a lecture audience composed largely of women with the word ‘Gentlemen!’, is partly excused for his belletristic waffling on the grounds that he was modestly ...”

“... on ‘his’ Pacific island. Professionally bound not to intervene, he stood by and watched a young ‘witch’ starve to death for her sorcery: now his affair with the young Katy is poisoned by guilt. Their first act of love takes place on a pile of books belonging to a dead anthropologist colleague (more symbolically ...”

“... great beneficiaries of this moment.In the first half of the 1960s he worked on several films with Arthur Penn, then secured the film rights to produce Vonnegut’s novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. The professional collaboration soon developed into a close, if imbalanced, friendship. Their correspondence provides a glimpse of a relationship just before a ...”

“... The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the ...”

“... latter mood, he would become condescending and puckish, and would draw contrasts between bumptious young America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a ...”

“... time and its beliefs: God, machines, money. Stations create ecosystems, a term coined in 1935 by Arthur Tansley, Sherardian Professor of Botany at the university. Park End Street and its continuation, New Road, used to be known as the ‘Street of Wheels’. The reference is to the garages and car dealerships that sprang up there in the 1930s. No one is ...”

“... were exclusive, but not too exclusive (unless you were of the wrong race or class): men and women, young and old, could play together, and flirt while they did so. If the tennis club was the main reason tennis entrenched itself as the chosen sport of middle-class professionals in the interwar years, what allowed it to become one of the most popular global ...”

“... mountains, the wild Pacific – and being treated for an hour to the story of Davis’s time as a young man in London, on the board of the New Left Review. It was definitely a funny story, but told with a Mark Twain, Yankee at the Court of King Arthur generosity. And of course I understood his laughter at my love of the ...”

“... rough man. The exasperating aspect of Eric Hammond is there – an occasional tendency, as with Arthur Scargill and latterly Mrs Thatcher, to speak of himself in the third person, a rather pleased way of saying: ‘Hammond wasn’t having any of that.’ So, more seriously, is his dedication to quarrelling. For better or worse, this union in its modern ...”

“... a touch of blouson at the shoulder – seemed to proclaim their dumb servitude to the bejewelled young Directors who were even now filing into the West Stand. And just look at the West Stand – those glass-faced boxes in which, thanks to an urgent application to the local magistrates, ‘business parties’ could escape the Government’s post-Brussels ...”