“... deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd thing to hear from the author of Impressions d’Afrique (1910) and Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932). But it makes sense when you consider some of the ‘impressions’ he recorded in his journal during his ...”

“... Orton and Halliwell pasted a monkey’s head onto Collins Guide to Roses; adorned a volume of John Betjeman’s poems with a photograph of a heavily tattooed, elderly man in swimming trunks; and glued pictures of giant cats onto the cover of Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys. At about the same time, a related tradition of artists’ books reached ...”

“... work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love letters to Boulton were already in the hands of the police and who was no doubt looking into diplomatic immunity. It was also a troubling time for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”

“... a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to ...”

“... themselves the beneficiaries of the electoral realignment Timothy anticipated. In the event, it took two general elections and parliamentary stalemate over Brexit for Labour’s ‘red wall’ to crumble, and by then Timothy – like Hill and, eventually, May – had long since paid the price for perceived failure. His fall was cushioned by well-remunerated ...”

“... her ‘reckless rustle over depths and difficulties’, which was very like a man to think.)When John Blackwood, who was publishing Miss Marjoribanks in serial in his magazine, taxed Oliphant with making Lucilla too ‘hard’, she responded: ‘I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down into tenderness ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors, heads bandaged, took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine ...”

“... The first time I took blood from someone it came as a surprise to both of us. All medical students must learn to take blood at some time during their course, but phlebotomy – like other skills requiring the use of sharp instruments – is usually left until the third year. A supplementary class I picked at the very beginning of my studies, however, turned out to include a practical lesson in blood-taking ...”

“... of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural speech. The Senator for New York, as he now is, has served four Presidents, and acted as American Ambassador to India and the United Nations. He is engaging, witty and learned; his prose has the facile deliciousness of Bourbon ...”

“... and falsity, reasonableness and unreasonableness. He is deeply concerned to show that Jefferson took his theory of the moral sense from Francis Hutcheson: he seems not at all interested in whether the theory of the moral sense is true. He seems, indeed, not even to be interested in how it fared in the intellectual arguments of the 18th century. And this ...”

“... hardened around the 1830s, but in other respects the forms that quoted and unquoted dialogue took in the 19th century, and the interplay between them and between dialogue and narration, were continuously variable and inventive. The complexity of the subject can be suggested by setting side by side two examples from Dickens noticed by Lambert.   Says ...”

“... of San Domenico in Cortona, Arezzo. Once he became a friar, Angelico’s career as a painter took off: he received a steady stream of commissions both from within the order and beyond it. One advantage of his dual calling was that he could work without having to follow the rules or pay the fees of the painters’ guild. For the next fifteen or so ...”