“... James Dean’. The former is a long-lined anthem, revelling in polysyllables, to ‘glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,/stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all/your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms!’, featuring ‘Mae West in a furry sled,/her bordello radiance and bland ...”

“... There is diagnostic touch (as in medicine); touch as the touchstone that is rubbed against gold or silver to measure its fineness (a term appropriated by Arnold to describe how verses of proven quality can be used to gauge the relative merit of literary works), and touch as the tester’s mark, his or her seal of ...”

“... of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest sister ...”

“... everyone else trying to guess the identity of the deceased. A premium was placed on quick-fire, silver-tongued brilliance. Not everyone, apparently, was able to keep up: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt found Henry James distinctly heavy in conversation and for a man who writes so lightly and well it is amazing how dull-witted he is. This is not only that he had no ...”

“... was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of annihilation. Carey plucks a sentence from a letter written in 1915 to Ottoline ...”

“... to a similar protest meeting at the old Mechanics’ Institute, where one of the speakers was Mrs Arnold Kettle. The Kettles were well-known left-wingers, Arnold Kettle a Communist and lecturer in English at the university. They lived not far from us in Headingley and were eventually, though not I think at this ...”

“... both ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ and ‘Audley Court’, ‘The snoring funnel whizzed with silver steam,’ has nothing inexact about it. Like Browning’s desert-crossing in ‘Sordello’ (‘Each camel churns a sick and frothy chap’), it is comic precisely because it combines sharpness of observation with the perfection of a manner. Browning might ...”

“... that move, figures of return. After contriving rites of passage modelled on the ceremonies of Arnold Van Gennep in his first trilogy The Arrivants, Brathwaite has set out, in his second – beginning with Mother Poem (1977) and Sun Poem (1982) – to demonstrate the ubiquitousness of empire, and to bring out the neglected role of blacks in governing as ...”

“... another pipe to let through the floor – well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and Crimson – Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva – and there I’d sit and read all day like the picture of somebody ...”

“... him ‘perhaps more nearly unique than any other English writer outside the great poets’ and Arnold Bennett made him the centrepiece of his Literary Taste (‘You cannot like Lamb without liking literature in general. And you cannot read Lamb without learning about literature in general’). Wilson points an accusing finger at Denys Thompson, whose ...”

“... now on I would spend my literary life alternating between writing novels and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied ...”

“... a vision.25 September. The Bradford Telegraph and Argus rings at about 10.30 to say that Jonathan Silver has died. I last spoke to him in July, when he rang to say that I had been much in his mind since he was now wholly at the mercy of his doctors and so was feeling like George III. Some of their procedures (a baseball cap filled with ice worn for some hours ...”

“... the day: The evening was dim, light grey with wet humid mist, swimming green. I took a pair of silver-plated scissors in my raincoat pocket with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red rose now giving ...”

“... and Hollywood played a big part in putting British ‘social consciousness’ drama on the silver screen (The Citadel, the first of Cronin’s novels to be filmed, was an MGM production of 1938; How Green Was My Valley a Darryl F. Zanuck film of 1941). But there was good reason why this narrative should have a special resonance in Britain. The country ...”

“... unity’ were still binding. Remarkably, the villagers of Shilton in Oxfordshire celebrated the Silver Jubilee by gathering at their church under ‘two huge, flaming crosses’ (they then said prayers for the nation, before trooping down to the village pond to sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’). Thatcher, a couple of years later, talked of the country ...”