“... to the United States with Auden in 1939 (at the first squeak of an air-raid warning, Waugh said), has often seemed eclipsed by his two comrades in writing. In the famous picture of ‘US THREE’ on Insel Ruegen taken by Spender (with what he archly referred to as his ‘masturbatory camera designed for narcissists’) in summer 1931, Christopher looks ...”

“... all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war. Four of them ...”

“... Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint it, but he refused, and during her husband’s lifetime she had not succeeded in finding another painter whom she trusted to touch it, so that it ...”

“... good journalists with the novelist’s mania, a certain passion for what can’t easily be said, and a zeal of conscience. In the better cases all this gathers itself rhythmically at the level of language. In the Greenock of Ascherson’s novel, people don’t look, they ‘keek’; people don’t cry, they ‘greet’; and children don’t yearn for a ...”

“... of cards from friends of my grandparents who had read of my arrest in the local paper. I was, they said, following in the footsteps of my grandfather, a conscientious objector in the Second World War and a lifelong member of the peace movement. After the war, he converted from Methodism to the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mum was raised a ...”

“... and Edwin was never to share Emily’s enthusiasm for the seaside (like half an apple, he said). The letters between them, which are the primary documentary source of Mary Lutyens’s book, are, when they deal with their feelings for each other, full of affectionate apologies, loving reassurances and tender explanations: but as they began, so they ...”

“... name. The London Evening News printed its afternoon editions on primrose paper. Margot Asquith said that ‘when the Prince of Wales went up the aisle, he was a nobody compared to Rosebery.’ Until 1951 the Scottish football team would often turn out in primrose and rose hoops, the racing colours of Rosebery, who was their honorary president. Long after ...”

“... inflames him, and then cunningly announces that she is embarking on a trip. ‘Darling Hera,’ said Zeus, ‘surely another day will do as well? Let us make love at once! Never in my entire life have I felt such intense longing for goddess or nymph as I feel for you this afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise ...”

“... Most versions of the story prefer a Housman who was ‘suicided’ by society – as Artaud said of Van Gogh – or, worse, a Housman who was his own natural victim, repressed and mined from within. The familiar tale includes his Worcestershire childhood among numerous siblings in Bromsgrove and its rural environs, looking across the Severn plain ...”

“... involved with, but the ‘show’: ‘Have you seen the show yet?’ Hamlet could seriously be said to be the greatest show on earth, a must for failing theatres and rising actors alike. In the 19th century in particular, its ghost, its court, its play scene and its duel scene, its mad adorable heroine and above all its sad soliloquising black-clad hero ...”

“... final pseudo-nuclear option. Not that the garotting of the NotW should jerk many tears. Some have said that its torrent of celebrity drivel, xenophobia, materialism, kitsch jingoism, shag-’n’-brag and bullying of the vulnerable should be written down as a cost of free speech. Maybe this stuff is to the red meat of political debate what cowpats are to ...”

“... well-paid occupation it was before 1978 when Jimmy Carter deregulated the aviation industry (with Edward Kennedy’s help) and the monopoly airlines had on their most profitable routes was lost. Sullenberger and Skiles have to hold down second jobs to make ends meet. It’s also a less glamorous profession – there’s so little for a pilot to do in the ...”

“... isn’t it?’There are nuggets, visual and verbal, at every turn of The Madman’s Orchestra. Yet Edward Brooke-Hitching’s new book (Simon & Schuster, £30), the third in a wonderfully illustrated series, is no gallimaufry. The Madman’s Library asked if a work of literature written on a shirt could be called a book; The Madman’s Gallery featured ...”

“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres’. To one Italian ...”