“... staying with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me laugh,’ attests Pamela Mitford. ‘Throughout our lives, whenever we met, we always burst out laughing,’ corroborates John Summerson. Betjeman’s own feelings about his role as laugh-raiser were ambivalent. To the end of his life, and ...”

“... prevailing sentimentality, his novels advanced radical ideas on politics, religion and education. Long before 1789, Bage was a sharp critic of England’s own ancien régime. Mount Henneth’s satirical reflections on warmongering in North America show his sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is ...”

“... when he presents an enigmatically fraught situation, in which the ‘truths’ of sexuality cast long shadows. And just what happened inside those Marabar Caves? Perhaps nothing at all; but characters and readers think out its implications in their own ways. Forster, who attempted in early drafts to portray a more explicit rape of Miss Quested, was wise, as ...”

“... 1. Now Eat This! by Rocco DiSpirito 2. Food Rules by Michael Pollan 3. Bank on Yourself by Pamela Yellen 4. What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel 5. The Belly Fat Cure by Jorge Cruise Yet the watered-down-Atkins-like-don’t-eat-anything-except-a-steak-and-lettuce-diet-accompanied-by-Psyllium-Husks is not my ...”

“... that’s just sent the nanny into a coma on the beanbag. Listening is one of the many things that Pamela Druckerman feels French parents get right. The source of this success, she tells us in French Children Don’t Throw Food (Doubleday, £15), is Françoise Dolto, one of the major figures of French parenting theory (the other, Druckerman says, is ...”

“... 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent his childhood in the Glenconners’ mock-Jacobean mansion ...”

“... this supposedly being her mental age. Diana was ‘Bodley’, because of her large head; Pamela was ‘Woman’, or ‘Woo’, because of her love of domesticity; Jessica was ‘Susan’ as well as ‘Decca’; Unity was ‘Bobo’ or, later, ‘Heart of Stone’. Nancy once wrote to Unity in Berlin to tell her that she’d done some research into ...”

“... at once. Other writers had personal reasons for joining the attack, above all Pope, whose decades-long feud with Curll receives its definitive treatment here, and Pope’s fellow Scriblerians Swift and Arbuthnot, whose response to another of Curll’s trademark genres, the instant posthumous biography, was to proclaim the publisher ‘one of the new terrors ...”

“... to her status and his career as to publish the book, and it was not printed until the 1790s, long after her death. The volume of travels and observations would probably not have pleased the authorities in Constantinople, and would certainly have been shocking to English society in the reign of George II. One of the letters describes a visit to a ...”

“... quite the same again, never able to achieve real intimacy with anyone, except dogs and horses. His long-term collaborator at the Clarendon Laboratory, the German refugee physicist H.G. Kuhn, summed him up perfectly: ‘Jackson’s strong feeling of independence had been enhanced during his upbringing by the sense of power that money gives, and even in his ...”

“... and intellectual coherence’ through the late 18th century. The heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela of 1740 had a better understanding of the fertile conjunction in married women between legal nothingness and affective significance. ‘My soul,’ she said, ‘is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but upon a foot with ...”

“... a similar scene in the new movie, although this involves sight rather than sound. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, as Frank Drebin Jr and Beth Davenport, a policeman and the sister of a murdered man, are playing with a dog in Frank’s apartment. One of the film’s bad guys, Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand), is watching them across the rooftops with a pair of ...”

“... cubicle by a short but perfectly square woman in uniform who lolled behind a desk and looked at me long and mean. I had been on a seven-hour flight and no one had mentioned before I got to Heathrow that Air Canada was all non-smoking. I was not cheerful. ‘What’s your job?’ ‘I’m a writer.’ ‘Why are you here?’ I showed her my letter from the ...”

“... fitted easily, marital tensions notwithstanding, into the London literary scene which he has long adorned. The second volume of his memoirs opens in 1939, with the author, not uncharacteristically, on a French holiday with a girlfriend and Cyril Connolly, in the course of which Mr Quennell and his nameless companion were stoned in a small provincial town ...”

“... sake of a bypass. Some miles outside Barnstaple down a very muddy lane live my friends Charles and Pamela Gott. Charles and I have been friends for almost sixty years. Indeed, he is almost my only surviving Oxford friend, as distinct from acquaintance. Our mutual affection has remained un-dimmed since the time when we first met at Oxford and ...”