“... nature, the devout and romantic, exerted itself more completely as he aged – so that what Brophy took to be the authentic Waugh, the brilliantly sardonic farceur, was ‘conclusively eaten by his successor, Mr Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, officer (ret.) and gentleman’. But the co-existence of startlingly different elements was there from the off. His ...”

“... pub. This was where the famous whitebait feast enjoyed at the close of Parliamentary sessions took place. They still do a whitebait platter – if you can stare without flinching at those cold grey eyes. I am not talking about the fish, but the ranks of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek ...”

“... Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both ...”

“... small sadnesses and victories of family, friendship, love, but they never seem solipsistic. Smith took a handful of favourite 1960s 45s – ‘We Like Birdland’ by Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, Chris Kenner’s ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’, Them’s ‘Gloria’ – and magicked their trashy pop into convincingly ecstatic art music. She threw a block party at ...”

“... reluctance (she ‘would murmur at no scene or fortune which she shared along with me’), he took her to live at Craigenputtock, near Dumfries, ‘a little estate of peat bog’, as Jane described it, ‘a tract of the worst land in this country’ with ‘a sort of house upon it’ that her mother used to threaten to send her to when she was ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... to his treatment of character, where the rigidity of his preconceptions undermined what he took to be his discoveries, it is not illogical that he should in general have enjoyed a critical free pass where he was weakest. Scholarship is one thing, readership another. Contrast in the reception of the two writers is not confined to the volume of academic ...”

“... the Ohio Browning has met. Reviewing its first two volumes, one of its severest critics, the late John Pettigrew, found that they didn’t make him want to modify the statement that ‘there is nothing remotely like a good scholarly edition of the works.’ It was, in fact, the problems of the Ohio Browning that made the editors of the Oxford Browning turn ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and the professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later’. It is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... that I would have to end it, if I couldn’t get my sentences sorted. Eventually I sorted them and took the piece to the Statesman’s office in Great Turnstile. When Karl had read it he said: ‘You’re a writer now.’ He was liable to make patriarchal remarks of that kind, and for better or worse – either way it’s a confession – I was very ...”

“... as when he cheats against an opponent in a duel: Before I could see the whites of his eyes I took aim and burnt off the priming powder on the pan lid. My opponent, assuming my musket had misfired and the touch-hole would be blocked, charged straight at me, pistol in hand, all too eager to make me pay for my presumption. Before he realised what was ...”