“... unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the ...”

“... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ...”

“... extra-Roth material that Bloom has to hand. Here, after all, is a woman who starred opposite Charles Chaplin at the age of 19 and who has acted with almost all the great actors of the mid-20th-century English theatre. Having enjoyed romantic trysts with Yul Brynner at Cecil B. De Mille’s country retreat, committed adultery with Lawrence ...”

“... seems is less interesting intellectually than a novel with which it shares a liquid affinity – Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Kingsley’s Christian Socialism linked potable water and spiritual purity in a sentimental fusion not dissimilar from Cheever’s. But whereas Kingsley was motivated by an indignation which even to this day has a power to carry ...”

“... fool enough to go to a desert island it is undoubtedly the work I should take with me. As it is, I hope to read the Diary all through once again before I die. Pepys’s Diary has a special character. Pepys was a competent civil servant who devoted his life to the service of the Admiralty Board. He wrote his Diary in his spare time. He showed it to no ...”

“... case, it is quite clear that many human capacities for communication have a hereditary basis, as Charles Darwin showed long ago – for instance, the smile of an infant and his yell of displeasure. Indeed, all powers of learning and teaching must depend upon particular activities of the brain. Each animal species is programmed to learn in its own special way ...”

“... from official in character. Roskill fought the censors of the Cabinet Office as resolutely as Sir Charles Webster did when writing his History of the Strategic Air Offensive. Roskill went on to write more personal books: three volumes on Hankey and as a final production a hilarious life of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty. He also launched a sharp attack on ...”

“... to literary agents than that they are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to ...”

“... sometimes with her mother or her sister, lived at a bewildering variety of addresses, consoled by hope. Humbert’s first book of poems, London Sonnets, was published in 1920, but he didn’t really make a stir until Requiem (1927), although Bagguley is surely wrong in saying that ‘no book of verse since Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy sold so ...”

“... most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles Unwin, a clerk at a detective agency, known only as ‘the Agency’, which occupies all 46 floors of the tallest building in an unnamed city that in some ways is quite like New York, only smaller (the Empire State Building has 102 storeys), and in other ...”

“... natural historical description and theological commentary. Some geologists, most notably Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33), played down the role of catastrophes in the Earth’s history, hoping ‘to free the science from Moses’ and other forms of what he condemned as imaginative excess. Reliance on smaller-scale changes, such as ...”

“... had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at the age of nineteen. Still, Suleyman had large shoes to fill. His father, Selim, had doubled the size of the empire during his eight years in power, and commentators in Western Europe at first viewed ...”

“... in her care.’ In other words, Restell was probably the best third party anyone in New York could hope for. For those who could pay her fees – the charge for a surgical abortion peaked at $200 – Restell had an unusual talent for extricating women safely from pregnancy (‘safe’ is a very relative term when it comes to Victorian obstetrics). The ...”

“... The first sentence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is one of the most memorable openings in all literature: ‘After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow. From there he rang Akmatova every day, begging her to come.’ That was in 1934, and in his indispensable Mandelstam, Clarence Brown outlined the circumstances which led to this smack, whose sharp report not only unloosed the avalanche in which the poet Osip Mandelstam perished but also prepared the volcanic action which would begin thirty years later when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sat down to write her memoirs ...”

“... way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less ...”