“... Kauffmann – a novelist as well as a film critic – originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as ‘a resonant noise as of a tennis racket striking a ball’ and categorises, with some understatement, as ‘rare’). In general, 1952 was a good year ...”

“... levy of anything between 5 and 20 per cent on most goods. Thus, in the decade when Adam Smith, himself a customs officer, was gathering material for The Wealth of Nations (1776), the British state achieved an intensity of protectionism never seen before or since. This pervasive system deeply affected both the pride and the pockets of the American ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in Smith College – like all the so-called Seven Sisters, something of a finishing school for young ladies from the East Coast’s upper middle class. At this point, though, Kelley’s thesis (and it is her only one) that Nancy, like her mother, was an all-out ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and tolerably easy of ...”

“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... intake of meat. (While preparing for Christ’s return Mrs White’s protégé, the nutritionist John Kellogg, developed a special vegetarian diet of processed corn, transforming Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Seventh-Day Adventists had their headquarters, into the Breakfast Food Capital of the World.) Like Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism is now a ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of ...”

“... of the Apocalypse reappear in the angel’s dialectical relationship with the storm. But unlike John the Revelator, who was told to ‘seal up those things which the thunders uttered and write them not’, Benjamin wrote down what the thunders said, for in the violence of the storm he seems to have heard the still small voice of Kant, arguing for ...”

“... that Muldoon has chosen to write about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically tricky, chooses to write about a poor poem ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of the daytime proceedings was covered (the ...”

“... Permira wants to acquire HMV. Hundreds of millions of borrowed pounds are flying around. WH Smith wonders whether to de-diversify and go back, wholeheartedly, into books. Meanwhile the high-street supermarkets are skimming the cream with bookstands offering bestsellers and Richard & Judy selections at bargain basement prices. And there is agitated, and ...”