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“... sacrifice and heroic failure. Not quite in the spirit of Alan Bennett’s paradox-mongering media don in The History Boys (‘Those who had been genuinely caught napping by the attack on Pearl Harbor were the Japanese’), Figes suggests that ‘the charge was in some ways a success’ and that Balaklava might even have been a British victory if the pursuit ...”

“... him during his final illness. It is amazing to think of those ornaments of the golden age of the don, seemingly happy to give unlimited time and hospitality to such a difficult guest. These days we would be more inclined to shrink away, fearing the disruption of RAE deadlines and unmet administrative demands, not to mention the rebellion of family ...”

“... fashioned dust-to-dust-type dust. I crush a little morphine up and sift it in. I add some water, cook it all down in a spoon, draw it up through a hormone needle, roll my sleeve. I stanch the blood with velveteen. Now I’m on the flower-print couch. Now I’m thinking, is that the morphine, or is that my mother? Something is setting beautiful fires up ...”

“... the young Welby Pugin and old Colonel Phillips, who had been round the world with Captain Cook, were welcome to keep Smith company while he dried out mouldy Rembrandts in front of the fire. Bores, among whom he numbered Haydon, were told there was no room. In the galleries of the museum where Napoleon’s Egyptian antiquities, captured by the ...”

“... made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various best-cult-classics ...”

“... enthusiasm, and Godfrey Smith asked: ‘What do you think about that, Francis?’ He replied: ‘I don’t know. I was asleep.’ There was never anything on his desk. He had a gesture, forbidding to an outside contributor, of sweeping imaginary flotsam from its surface with the little finger of his right hand, which, after a while, had raised a bubble like a ...”

“... performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock – but, under that, went a long, starched cotton petticoat; another short, starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very ...”

“... I give him a quid, saying that I bet it’s a good pitch. He’s so set on giving me his spiel I don’t think he even hears. But I’m sure it is a good spot: people who’ve just got the all-clear giving him something out of gratitude and those who haven’t giving him something because they’re hoping for some luck in their treatment.1 April. It occurs ...”

“... These points aside, Ponting’s book makes very depressing reading. Wilson, former Liberal, former don, former civil servant, had persuaded the Bevanite Left in the Fifties that he was their man. But Ponting presents him as an opportunist who enjoyed power and its trappings for their own sake and, still more fatally, ‘loved the Whitehall system. He admired ...”

“... family near Nîmes, who became, for 40 years – from 1912 until he died – Fullerton’s lover, cook-housekeeper and common-law wife. When Fullerton was dying, his ex-wife went to Mme Pouget’s house and took two trunks of his papers away at gunpoint: two old ladies in their seventies, at war over the love-letters of their 87-year-old ...”

“... was always part of him that gloried in his reputation as a lady-killer, the sinful, depraved Don Juan. The mad, bad, dangerous-to-know sadist.’ I now wonder if part of his ardent embrace of Look Back in Anger – ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger,’ he memorably pronounced (an odd bit of emotional blackmail ...”

“... star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his literary heroes Hemingway, Ian Fleming and C.S. Forester, and tried, with the encouragement of Forester, to kick-start his own automatic grammatisator and sell stories to periodicals. In the short stories from the ...”

“... the selection for you in a way – what I did remember, I remembered for a reason. Also, though I don’t think my stories are particularly libellous, I felt a sort of embarrassment at writing about people I know, which was solved simply because most of the people I wrote about in Mrs Henderson and The Other Garden are dead. It’s not so much that I’m ...”

“... his son, hated talking about himself, didn’t smoke much after the cigars of middle age, and I don’t know about the balling, or the eggs, which Auden says are the test of bad biography.But there are bad biographies that tell you nothing about their subject’s breakfast preferences, and The Whole Harmonium is one such. Stevens is one of those apparently ...”

“... overwhelming majority of US forces felt a cultural disdain for Vietnam’s inhabitants. Draftee Don Graham, the son of the owner of the Washington Post, spoke of ‘the unanimous feeling of contempt for Vietnamese soldiers among Americans’. ‘I saw men who behaved with great compassion towards the Vietnamese one day,’ Phil Caputo wrote, ‘and then ...”