“... the lyric.’Giving a useful biographical sketch of Palgrave (an Oxford pal of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, and an admirer of Tennyson), Bucknell relates his professional work in English adult education to a growing passion for ‘England’s native literature … English history and the values of the English people’. After all, ‘England’s ...”

“... jobs?’ Dalton, of course, heartily concurred: ‘Ernie Bevin, I and others weren’t going to be little Attlees. Why can’t Nye feel the same?’ Moreover, even when he had accepted a supporting role under Gaitskell’s leadership, Bevan continued to pain his admirers by his tergiversations. ‘He’s like a great big jelly, which has to be pulled back into ...”

“... exist. Pork was a distant second.) That is, there were cosmological grounds for concluding that a little of what you fancy does you good. The appetites might, indeed, be a reliable guide to wholesome food, but they needed to be mastered. You should, in general, eat less, and always leave the table with your appetite unsatisfied. Until at least the late 19th ...”

“... the added material. In I iv the speaker has a vision of cruel and violent Nature: ‘And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.’ The Trinity MS has ‘full of plunder and prey’, empty in comparison; the published reading strengthens both alliteration and idea (the ‘little’ wood is a ...”

“... for the TLS all this time? FW: Yes, though I stopped with a thud when Alan Pryce-Jones left and Arthur Crook came. I think I was too associated in his mind with the frivolity of the Pryce-Jones era. AH: Wasn’t the TLS lively and good under Pryce-Jones? FW: I thought it was, I loved it. It was very unLeavisite, or anything like that. I think it made Leavis ...”

“... A whole page follows of indictment so vehement that the qualifying ‘in a violent form’ is of little effect. But the denunciation comes from the man in his mid-fifties as he writes his book. Back in the mid-1870s, when he has already, in his own phrase, ‘pushed’ himself into ‘a powerful clique’ of people eminent in literature and the arts, he is ...”

“... a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the church, putting on best ...”

“... After crossing the river, the little band of Palaeolithic hunters huddled together shivering on the far bank. They were cold and wet, but they still had their flint-tipped spears. Men and women together, side by side collected dry brushwood at the top of the sandy shore and tried to start a fire. Here at least the ground was firm, unlike the flat swamps of the south bank, and in the distance ahead they could see a line of northern heights, shaggy with forest ...”

“... figure of speech defined long ago by some pedantic Greek as a paradiastole, indicating how far a little truth can go to create a large impression. We have all employed the trope, or been conned by it. STOPIT CONTROLS DANDRUFF. Futile to come pounding the ad-man’s desk six months later: he will merely blow your dandruff off his desk and ask you sadly when ...”

“... seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy ...”

“... compelling ties between those who unite in love of country and people. I was sitting down in my little cell, after looking out the bars at the moon shining … I was happy for I was not alone. There were others looking at the same moon who were, like me, in prison for Cymru Rydd a Cymraeg [A Free Welsh-Speaking Wales] and others fasting for Christmas, and I ...”

“... her opinions matter. Most of all it is clear that she will be switching her vote to him. That little cameo underscores the story told in, but partially concealed by, these memoirs. Jenkins first stood for Parliament in 1945, at the age of 24. He has stood in every general election since, apart from that of 1979. He has also fought three by-elections, two ...”

“... muster the mental energy to work it out. Nor does he have the wits to figure out the role of Doris Arthur, the feminist scriptwriter hired by Fielding to work on Good Money. At first, Self treats her just like any other chick. He makes a lunge and is frostily rebuffed. Fielding tells him that this was because she is a lesbian, and this effectively disposes of ...”

“... left of ancient Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered ...”

“... Ford, an appealingly talented and gossipy subject, has naturally attracted biographers. In 1971 Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story seemed adequately exhaustive, but now Max Saunders comes along with two vast volumes, even more thorough and more than doubling the page count. Alan Judd, faithful to Ford’s own lack of respect for academic pieties, brought ...”