“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... organ, that his heavy middle-European accent seemed to issue, and hardly at all from the little mouth, perched below its overhang, that only appeared to serve as a hub, for a cartwheel of wrinkles.’ The librarian owner of this nose lives doubly in texts: among his shelves and, fleetingly, in Ernest Jones’s biography, where he appears as the ...”

“... have been one of the minor players in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: perhaps a little like the fabled Truscott who is going to become a great poet, great actor, great statesman, great something or other. Needless to say, little more is heard of Truscott, but Mackenzie was one of those rare birds who not ...”

“... affairs. Strong on principle but again lacking an enforcement mechanism, the Pact had little practical effect. Some countries evaded it by avoiding formal declarations of war. In 1945, the UN Charter required all states to ‘refrain . . . from the threat or use of force’. It thus extended the prohibition on war to include undeclared ...”

“... is realism,’ a USIS official reported to Arnett. ‘Two days ago we staged a great attack on a little outpost. We had the men defending it like heroes and their women binding their wounds ... We don’t want to show the cruel things like bodies. We want to show how the Vietnamese fight the war as people.’ Peter Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize for ...”

“... it comes upon me: pains in the back, hesitation on the feet. It is all sure to get worse. How well Arthur Koestler arranged things: just my age and then passed peacefully away. I too should like to indent for a death pill. If all other claims fail I could justify an issue of death pills as a precaution against nuclear warfare, which is rapidly approaching. I ...”

“... it looks more like life than death.’ Thus, some of the early poems have a tendency to do little more than dispense poetic justice. But as the selection progresses, the over-asserted paradoxes, the authorial pleas for perseverance, soften into gentler poetic phrasings; thoughts become more successfully embodied in images. In ‘Branch Line’, one of ...”