“... as a masculine protest against the mechanical womb he inhabited. And in Portrait of the Artist a young man informs his friend that he admires, the Venus de Milo because her broad hips show she would be good at bearing his children. To maintain the Silent Service’s reputation for courtesy the officer no doubt merely reminded his mentor of the limited ...”

“... Nancy Mitford’s first novel, Highland Fling, is about a young British gentlewoman in the late 1920s, wriggling uneasily but divertingly in the generation gap of her time and class. Her parents’ generation seems to be stuck in the mud of the grouse moors: tough as old boots, the elders blaze away, pausing to reminisce about World War One and the filthy Hun ...”

“... curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘And you got none neither,’ she said, pressing the tissue into her sleeve. Only ten minutes’ walk from the Kennedy house in Brookline, another ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”

“... who – he suggests – probably heard it from Reggie Turner. In her version, ‘a curious, very young, but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt, he said, “as if an icy hand had clutched at his heart”. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of folly, misery and ruin.’ The sex of this ...”

“... partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to happen. Years later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun ...”

“... into insanity, probably resulting from syphilis caught during his rowdy years in the theatre as a young man. These complications could not chill his exuberant flow of invention, or exclude him from centres of prestige and power. Dazzlingly precocious, he was designing furniture for the king in Windsor Castle at the age of 15. Towards the end of his short life ...”

“... be disappointed on opening the book, which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her ...”

“... not at all like Swann and even less like Proust himself. A literary parallel would be Stendhal’s young hero Lucien Leuwen, though it would be difficult to imagine him transposed into the English social scene. Duff Cooper had the same great capacity for enjoying life, which is not uncommon: much less common was his ability to do so in such a way that the ...”

“... Tory reaction. Brockliss attempts the usual throat-clearing defence against the damning verdict of Edward Gibbon, who went up in 1752. He said he spent an ‘idle and unprofitable’ time there, and spoke of the fellows as ‘decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel ...”

“... It was a conflict involving the whole nation. The army opened its ranks to all fit to serve, and young men streamed in to ‘do their bit’, from the city, from the plough. They came with an enthusiasm which survived the discomfort and ineffiency of the camps where they had to sleep in non-existent tents and train with non-existent weapons. They were ...”

“... knobbly Knebworth House, which looks as though it’s built of papier-mâché, compete? In 1843 Edward Bulwer-Lytton had the Tudor manor house remodelled – in Pevsner’s words – as a ‘romantic paraphrase of the Gothic palace’, reflecting his own overblown historical fiction. The 16th-century banqueting hall survived – it has been used in more ...”

“... and his surprisingly tender and encouraging letters to members of his family, to aspiring young authors and to the few people – Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance – whom he loves or admires. It is a daunting thought, particularly as no one seems ever to have thrown away a letter from Thomas or Jane: the libraries of the world are stuffed with ...”

“... she knows no more than anybody else and can only ask a string of questions. Eddy, first-born of Edward and Alexandra, the ‘dawdly’ flaccid prince with the long simian arms and the prominent collar and cuffs, armed with the potentially damning knowledge of how to disembowel deer, must be acquitted of the Ripper charge for lack of evidence. What else is ...”

“... of it all may cause some puzzlement. It is hard to grasp the interest or importance of Edward Trelawny’s shopping lists during 1820-1823. These take up sixty pages of Volume VIII, and honesty forces the editors to admit that ‘the amount of useful information that can be readily extracted is disappointingly slight.’ In ...”