“... were everywhere, remaking a bad world. But I knew the cast of characters. Emily, me; Gerald, Roger, my boyfriend and free-school organiser with the children from the free school. The Survivors. Just a few. But what can you do with a benighted world? Only the ones who can see will see. It’s a shame but you can’t save everyone. But actually, I didn’t ...”

“... enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave. But that more than anything made me tear up during the tribute programmes. What distressed him most about dying, said this icon of narcissism once, was the thought of missing watching his daughter grow ...”

“... lack of large-mindedness ‘does not prevent Updike from imagining him largely’, as Roger Sale put it in the New York Times, though they are stretched when very literary formulations are meant to be Ben’s unspoken words: ‘Each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.’ This seems too sharply ...”

“... suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations. The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose ...”

“... latest collaboration: a disguised, disjointed autobiography. At the same time his old comrade, Roger Daltrey, advertises credit cards on television, which is another way of confounding the philosophy of a group that had hoped to die before getting old. As if to cock a snook – if cocking snooks is something technology is capable of – the longest ...”

“... Joan Miller and Tyler Kent’ illustrates the point. Joan Miller was a redoubtable young woman who found her way into the transport section of MI5 in September 1939, and attracted Knight’s attention almost at once. It wasn’t long before she was transferred to the more glamorous ‘B’ division. Here I must declare an interest. In 1982, I ...”

“... Burgess, Blunt and Philby cases has to be less about the current television image of privileged young Bolsheviks conspiring to the sound of choirboys in the ancient quad than about the sheer blithering incompetence of the mandarins who let them get away. But one could usually survive one’s blunders in the British Foreign Service if one came from the right ...”

“... Western Eyes, another novel that proved too much for Garnett. He once remarked admiringly of the young Arnold Bennett that ‘the most interesting thing about him is the strange amalgam he presents of commercial man pure and simple, and author’. But he had to deal with less adaptable authors, and he did so with skill and endless enthusiasm. His review of ...”

“... structure and life of our family units are changing. Marriage is popular – often contracted at a young age, and often not very durable. But in spite of the present ease of entering and leaving wedlock, 16 per cent of births, 99,000 children a year, are illegitimate. Yet only three and a half thousand of these come on the adoption market. A lot of family life ...”

“... amused himself in the evenings, when drunk, by cutting down the flag with rifle shots) and a young man “of good family”, aged 24, who had been guilty of two murders.’ Such passages made his critics fume, but the larger fact was Suret’s extraordinary scholarship – his books are mines of social and economic information. It was bad enough that he ...”

“... who grasp mine. But mere acknowledgment, however sincere – ‘I dig you,’ or ‘I read you. Roger and over’ – is not conclusive evidence of successful communication. The Latin pupil gets low marks who says: ‘Oh, I know what it means but I can’t quite put it into words.’ In spite of the immense range of subjects that Quine covers, there are ...”

“... self, squaring accounts with the past. His starting-point is the year 1926, in Monaco, where young Edmund is fashionably adrift among the gaming wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... goes mad, Rimbaud abandons writing, Lautréamont dies abnormally young): i.e. the poet’s destiny is to risk madness despair and death for the sake of a possibility of a redeeming existence by means of the secret power of the Word. In a footnote to this apotheosis of the poet as doomed super-rationalist, avatar of the ...”

“... the price that saves Marlowe from contamination. ‘You’re all alone in the dark,’ a drunken Roger Wade says to Marlowe, referring to the indifferent woman hiding within his beautiful wife. ‘Baby wants to go bye-bye.’ Only Marlowe’s detachment saves him from Wade’s fate. The fire that Cissy warmed her hands at was burning witches. Women are the ...”