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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... German missionary’, was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent ...”

“... own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St John’s. He later moved to Trinity Hall, where he complained to his rich uncle that he had ‘runn somewhat deepe into my Tailours debt’. He studied law and acquired expensive friends, many of whom he retained throughout his life. In 1623, aged over thirty, he took holy orders. A period as a ...”

“... denunciations has (mostly) lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last ...”

“... also sees Lauren as a ‘movie-maker manqué’, whose designs for The Great Gatsby and Annie Hall exerted broad cultural influence. On the British side, McDowell praises Laura Ashley as the English counterpart of Ralph Lauren. ‘Her inspiration came from the lives of ordinary folk: Victorian schoolrooms and vicarages; the dress of countrywomen ...”

“... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn arrived in the Bay Area that same ...”