“... the simplicity worked together. Commenting on the stanza beginning ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene ...’ he points out that it means 18th-century England had no carrière ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it ... By comparing the social arrangement to Nature, he ...”

“... Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to Bernard Reiss, the tailor in Albion Place in Leeds who made me my first suit in 1954. The note is about two 7/6 seats which I’d booked ...”

“... discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors who have ‘ceased for twenty years to write anything of ...”

“... of burglary for long. Morgan’s imagination thrives, apparently, upon motifs which in another man would be morbid but in him are converted opportunities, no harm left in them. He likes to take big themes – ‘the real Clyde’, Glasgow, blindness, abortion – and drive them far beyond their official forms. Sometimes too far. I can’t make much of his ...”

“... conviction, before either relinquishing the broken carcass – ‘I do not want to come between a man and his mother’ – or being relinquished by it. To Garbo’s distress, MGM fired Stiller from the direction of The Temptress: he was taking too long over it and he had ordered the leading man, Tony Moreno, Hollywood’s ...”

“... non-event in the calendar of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No ...”

“... outlaws acting out the poet’s fantasies and those of his readers. Conrad the Corsair, ‘that man of loneliness and mystery’, is typical. Having got wind that the Turkish Pacha intends to attack him on his ‘Pirate’s isle’, he launches a pre-emptive assault, which involves the dubious tactic of infiltrating the Turkish palace during a ...”

“... he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature ...”

“... real locations among real people going about their ordinary business. Later, after Eileen and a man she’s picked up have had sex in a derelict building, there’s a further montage of a dozen or so shots – many more than mere reality-effect would require – of workmen demolishing a row of houses. Social realism could be said to revive alongside the ...”

“... Sure enough, Jesus appeared to the 16-year-old Moon and informed him that he was the chosen man, thus making him one of the hundred-plus messiahs Korea had spawned in only a century. According to Moon’s official biography, he then gained a degree as an electrical engineer at Waseda University in Japan (though the university has no record that he was ...”

“... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to life. He ...”

“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... by others for bringing home the full horror of the war (the Dean of Durham and the zoologist Ray Lankester thought it a disgrace), and it was the one scene in the film that was not authentic and had been faked up behind the lines. Hynes brings the same flair to advertisements. He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement ...”

“... wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast rivers, the mighty resinous trees of the western Sierra Nevada. In a letter of 1871 to the friend who elicited much of his most heartfelt incidental writing, Jeanne Carr, wife of the professor of agriculture ...”

“... in the way of his subsequent career as a novelist, screenwriter and TV host, or his cameo in Iron Man 2.Recently, however, a wave of newly retired special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men ...”