“... appropriate for royalty. Left to her own devices she liked a prawn cocktail, convinced that Marie Rose sauce was a ‘far more exotic mix’ than ketchup and mayonnaise.Over the decades the princess and her lady in waiting became an effective double act. They made a striking couple: at nearly six foot tall, Glenconner towered over Margaret’s ...”

“... was taken on a widely publicised tour of ‘forty universities and 43 cocktail parties’. He also rose to prominence in the world of cinema, both as the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad – in which a glamorously distressed couple talk endlessly about whether or not they met the year before in a deserted hotel – and as the director ...”

“... who had been heavily pregnant at William’s funeral – had given her baby the middle name Rose. She had placed a rose in William’s coffin. Christine gave me a copy of what she called ‘William’s story’, written on seven A4 sheets of paper in an erratic mix of capital and lower-case letters.Christine is dead ...”

“... them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded ...”

“... something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning her own deuxième carrière as a narratologist, describes narratology as ‘immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the price of becoming a separate theoretical ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... than sterile dilettante, officious critic and connoisseur (‘here you miss/Or there exceed the mark’). As such, the character clearly influenced a second writer, earlier than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ...”

“... in which Stevens found his niche at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916; he rose to Vice President of the firm in 1934 and was still working there at the time of his death) but claims to hear ‘puns’ in such phrases as ‘barque of phosphor’ or ‘droning of the surf’ in the early ‘Fabliau of Florida’, or the ...”

“... to return favours … which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.After Conrad’s death, Rich ...”

“... rugs in a small chamber. ‘As soon as they recognised the presence of a Sahib among them, they rose en masse, and, with the greatest gravity, proceeded to “shoo” me out of their presence as one might “shoo” a strayed fowl. It seems that I had trespassed too close to the ladies, and as none of the five elders understood English, they had adopted ...”

“... seemed frail and eccentric. But as the decades passed, the morale and the standing of churchmen rose. Presbyterianism was parried, popery contained; the Anglican via media gave England the long peace denied to envious European states; the recruitment of graduates improved the quality of the parochial ministry; and the lay rulers of the shires found reasons ...”

“... My greatest virtue has been the virtue of Talent. I inscribe it large and plain. Simplicity is the mark of the craftsman. Talent shares its box with Deceit, the same word in Siddilic for Forgery. ‘ALL THIS WORK IS FALSE,’ I have written and decorated in gold. Now my Sins and Virtues are complete. I leave the manuscript unsigned ... The Minister’s ...”

“... with journeying, the kind of internal ‘itinerary’ which (in Mandelstam’s image) is the mark of achieved poetry. Like Clampitt, he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature ...”

“... 85 rupees) – the rough equivalent of 70 per cent of total public revenue. Pakistan will mark the new millennium with a foreign debt of $42 billion and a domestic debt of $70 billion: the combined figure is $50 billion higher than GDP. While I was there, the Army was asked by the Government to take over the Water and Power Development Authority ...”

“... shrine is easily flooded, recalling the story that after the holy man’s death an island of sand rose from the sea and the bearers of the saint’s bier were compelled to inter him there, where the elements miraculously met and merged. A place of shifting elements and boundaries, Luar Batang also marks another meeting. It contains two holy tombs, those of ...”