“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los ...”

“... plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots bartering sex for a ring. To quote Julie Christie, who would know: ‘They exist to be disliked by the heroes.’How, then, to make sense ...”

“... drew inspiration from eclectic sources. By the 1960s some of them – Alison and Peter Smithson, Ruth Glass – had come to see Victorian forms more appreciatively. Indeed, as a clever piece by Sarah Mass shows, urban planners deliberately evoked the bogeyman of the European ‘piazza’ to build consensus around proposals that would preserve but also ...”

“... spirited fiction, incongruities – rebels cut down by electroplated ornaments from the banqueting hall rammed down the gun muzzles – will only take us so far. Farrell, however, has his own ‘normal’ voice, the expression of a variously humane and sympathetic personality, and this steers the narrative through flights of fancy which seem more like ...”

“... off here and there the note of each species, as if he had been a child left alone in a concert hall with the deserted instruments of a full orchestra. Finding a sealion snoring on the bank of its pool, he rippled the water suddenly. He was a quarter of a mile away when he heard the responding bark.In this vision of an animal meeting neighbours he has never ...”

“... called Luther from a pay phone. They picked him up at a petrol station and went to another beer hall, where Vickers stayed behind. Back on the road, Luther told Martin to stop the car, and they got out. Luther had a ketchup bottle full of salt. He stuck it in Martin’s back and told him it was a gun. Martin was not convinced, so Luther knocked him over the ...”

“... close friend.A lover of the mid-Twenties, a hard-drinking ‘tough-faced’ young secretary named Ruth Baldwin, was responsible for what is unquestionably one of the most peculiar elements in Carstairs’s story. Around the same time that Carstairs began to take an interest in speedboat racing – she closed the X Garage and commissioned her first hydroplanes ...”

“... of this is new. There has always been a ‘push and pull’, as he puts it, between COBA, City Hall, the federal courts, lawyers, activists, incarcerated people and public opinion. Shanahan was himself briefly detained on Rikers, in 2014, after taking part in a protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His book is an ...”

“... climate of paragraph one, we arrive at paragraph two which begins: ‘ “Life is hell,” Ruth Cook wrote on the lid of a desk, hoping that someone would see it and that there would be a row.’ And with that, of course, we are off and running. If I may venture another ‘of course’, there is nothing worse in life than a book review which tells the ...”

“... that had been gaining influence in the wider culture for decades. Not long afterwards, Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, announced that her university would begin to reckon with its historical entanglement with slavery. That initiative inspired administrators at other institutions. In 2004 the University of Alabama issued a formal ...”

“... and Brecht’s favourite Hasek to give a voice to the private soldier, his use of music-hall songs, catchy rhythms and plebeian idiom provided a model for the popular vitality of Brecht’s own songs, so unlike the more lofty and emotive socialist poetry of the German Expressionists (his relation with whom, as with Piscator, is also sensitively ...”

“... Channon’s account of his and others’ sex lives is jaw-dropping. In 1956, he went to Holkham Hall in Norfolk for the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. In her recent memoir, Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner describes her husband’s sexual proclivities, but also says that in those days girls of her class couldn’t ...”

“... she seems at times little more than a minor character. The true protagonist, perhaps, is Holkham Hall, the family home in Norfolk. For centuries the English country house has been a locus of personal identity, and not only for its owners. Tenant farmers, gamekeepers, indoor and outdoor staff often felt – in some places still feel – deeply attached to an ...”

“... College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole – he came up with the idea of drawing recipes as cartoon strips. At first these were for personal use only – he didn’t want to spoil his ‘expensive ...”

“... own orchestra, the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, which gave concerts every Saturday in the town hall. A group of us from the sixth form used to sit behind the orchestra (seats sixpence) and always behind the double basses. Drucker was a young man then but quite heavily built, a cross between Alfred Marks and the actor who played One-Round in The ...”