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“... itself to be, that it should be formative, providing experiences that will stand you in good stead throughout adulthood. Traditionally, of course, these experiences include things like the group masturbation session Roland remembers: ‘The two boys removed their pyjama bottoms. Roland had never seen pubic hair before or a mature penis or an erection. At ...”

“... than in most accounts, and emerge the worse for it. James’s gravity, Edward’s conventionality, Henry’s volatility, Frank’s unremitting practicality and Charles’s gentleness are firmly rendered. The nephews and nieces include some spoilt children and some charming ones. (Edward’s son George may not have wished to be fixed in life and death with the ...”

“... of individual 20th century novelists. Of the latter, I particularly liked the essay by Alistair Stead on the art of naming in the fiction of Henry Green. Glyn Hughes’s creative personality contrasts sharply with David Storey’s. Where Storey draws his imaginative sustenance from what’s under his nose, and achieves ...”

“... as a bedel (the double who rich men used to pay to go to Mecca or fight in the army in their stead). But when she returns with photographs and anecdotes, her mother doesn’t recognise present-day Sofia. This is Ugrešić’s territory: the impossibility of belonging, the ineluctability of loss and the desirability, even so, of remaining apart. By ...”

“... she enjoys the benefit of total recall, a characteristic which has stood Philip Ziegler in good stead. For large stretches of the book he has been faced with no greater challenge than to transcribe her memories in grammatical English. Indeed for the opening fanfares of her life the job was already done, since The rainbow comes and goes, the first volume of ...”

“... accidents on which the fates of generations have rested, that Charles’s elder brother, Prince Henry, had not chanced to die young, and had reigned in Charles’s stead. Suppose that, as king, Henry had lived up to the Calvinists’ hopes and pursued the ecclesiastical reforms and the ...”

“... in nature and the efficacy of breeding. Here Darwin’s charm once again stood him in good stead, as he plied neighbours for information about pigeon breeds, and persuaded friends and family to translate German articles, count snails and boil bird skeletons. ‘When he talked about the “hidden hand” of selection thereafter, he almost always ...”

“... stammer of paternal grief: ‘My son, my son, Absalom! Would that I had died in your stead!’ (2 Samuel 19). Such moments reflect an unflinching insight into the essential unpredictability of character and into irreconcilable conflict within the character – between political necessity and personal bonds, between pragmatic reason and emotion ...”

“... Fleet Street’s reporting of the Royal Family more factual.’ That might have stood her in good stead with the Lucan family, with all of whom she is on Christian-name terms. They have certainly spent many hours together. Of Bill Shand Kydd, Lucan’s brother-in-law, she writes: ‘In truth,’ he had ‘actually inherited £500,000 from the family wallpaper ...”

“... of the rest of his life had begun. But the ‘feudal capitalistic show’, as the MP and diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon called it, had to go on. Five months later in the Abbey, Channon described the splendour of the occasion, the north transept ‘a vitrine of bosoms and jewels and bobbing tiaras’, while at the centre, the fragile, stuttering king was ...”

“... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...”

“... in the US has proceeded so rapidly. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (the line is Christina Stead’s but Wallace used it twice in his fiction and once in an essay, in reverse; Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about ...”

“... will he be a Daedalus or an Icarus? ‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.’ Like Joyce he should have said it every day, clutching his talent to guide his genius. All too often he flew too near the sun. David Minter is naturally fully aware of a division of forces in Faulkner’s make-up, an attraction towards the real, a ...”

“... came into conflict of a thoroughly traditional and predictable kind. This conflict sharpened when Henry V of England, who had revived dynastic claims of his own to the French Crown, offered to fight alongside Burgundy. The effects were duly felt in frontier regions – raiding and thieving in and around Domrémy became frequent. In 1423, the husband of ...”

“... to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive with the possibility of a new national ...”