“... stood from the green jungle carpet, browning at the top like cauliflowers. Their trunks curve a little this way and that, giving the appearance of reptilian life.’ So Greene describes it in Congo Journal. It might well have been while running away from these afternoon bores that he imagined the flight of Deo Gratias, Querry’s boy, into the forest at ...”

“... and then returned to the cart. Certain words are spoken. At the end, a shiny card is put into a little slot and taken out again, and a folded slip of paper is given to the people by the priest. The people depart into the world outside with their things. The anthropologist has come from another planet or another time, perhaps the time when Zola called the ...”

“... they are: Mr Wise is a dunce, Mr King is a Whig, Mr Coffin’s uncommonly sprightly, And huge Mr Little broke down in a gig While driving fat Mrs Golightly.The lines come to life when they begin to see names less as clues to the characters of their owners – whether faithfully reflected, or just as reliably not – than as temporary restrictions or skins to ...”

“... and joyous hystorye’, and its presumptive author, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase, ‘little better than a criminal’. Actually, Lewis much understated the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory of Newbold Revel was not ‘...”

“... Dorset peasantry were ‘exceedingly just and clear-sighted’. In the Twenties Powys was still little known, though that was to change when Mr Weston’s Good Wine won enough esteem to become one of the first sixpenny Penguins. (It even got a perceptible nod of approval from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended ...”

“... their fathers, must become themselves, for how else will they acquire the authority to teach the little replicas to come? When this part of the message is being advertised, the tone of the novel becomes tediously wise: ‘Everything has to come to an end, Timothy,’ says Clement. ‘But that’s only because other things have to begin. You walk from one ...”

“... also fingering Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and all the other post-Sixties editors. There is little disagreement, however, about when the glory days began. The New Statesman whose past is so ubiquitously pressed into service for rival versions of its future is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley ...”

“... be attributed to systems of stimulus and response (ring bell, dog salivates), behaviourists had little need for germ plasm, cheerfulness factors or heritability. Perhaps more significant, studies of the biological bases of psychological traits came into stark disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s owing to their prominent place in Nazi eugenics ...”

“... times, and it has now been on the international diplomatic agenda for a century and a half. When Arthur Koestler visited it during the 1948 war, he was filled with gloom at the ‘international quarrelling, haggling and mediation’ that he could see looming. ‘No other town,’ he wrote, ‘has caused such continuous waves of killing, rape and unholy ...”

“... namely, that he did indeed think he could become Leader of the Labour Party. He had been in very little doubt about that matter from the moment he became the youngest-ever President of the Board of Trade in the post-war Attlee Government. But it took him 18 years of slithering up and down Disraeli’s greasy pole from the moment of his election to Parliament ...”

“... day. Woolf himself had a long spell as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and finding there very little society he was willing to describe as congenial, he sought consolation by correspondence with his Cambridge friends, especially Lytton Strachey. Later on, he wrote a multitude of letters as editor, publisher and politician. So it is not remarkable that in ...”

“... Sometimes we call it plagiarism as well, ‘but that is a harsh word when one considers how very little there is in the way of character and plot to go around.’ The irony is a bit hefty, but the effects can be eerie and funny. The lady realtor – Heinemann’s text, one degree more post-structuralist than Vidal’s, calls her a ‘relator’ – remembers ...”

“... the brittle quality of the early work, or the rambling freedom of the long sequence. It feels a little thin and belated. On the other hand, it is quietly and consistently funny, and so full of Powell’s characteristic note that it may help us to see what that note is. Let’s start with what seems to be a difficulty. The book is written in a blurred prose ...”

“... whom Hardinge had encouraged to do so much detailed work on redrawing the map of the world had little influence on the outcome. In part this was a result of Lloyd George’s belief that information may be power but knowing when to ignore it was essential to the successful manipulation of power. Instead of relying on Foreign Office expertise, he relied on ...”

“... Ireland, beginning with the first non-stop transatlantic flight, made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann reconstructs the perils of the journey, the freak weather and mechanical trouble, as well as the ‘genius and magic’ needed to see them through. The chapter is high on technical detail and period slang (plenty of Great Scotts and ...”