“... When​ faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’     Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer,     But a few think him pleasant enough.The first observation was originally made by somebody who did not know Mr Lear ...”

“... among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted even by his nearest ...”

“... a photograph in Harper’s Bazaar and mentioned it to Howard. The image was of a smartly dressed young woman standing outside the door to a blood bank – it had a slightly vampiric quality. This was the start of what would be called ‘the Look’. The young woman was Betty Joan Perske, born in the Bronx in September ...”

“... loathsome to her) reptiles. Melanie was the youngest of four children, of whom two were to die young, the third child Sidonie of scrofula at the age of eight and her adored brother Emmanuel at the age of 25, of heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and drug addiction. Emmanuel appears to have fantasised for some time about such an early ...”

“... what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against whatever he sees as the conventional wisdom – or, worse still, the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think and ...”

“... the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a ...”

“... the dirty work, or one who had been killed in a Christian cause. An example of the first kind is Edward the Confessor; of the second, Edmund, murdered by Vikings in 869 for refusing to give up Christianity. This demarcation between sainthood and active kingship was one way in which society tried to uphold high moral ideals in an immoral world. Clergy were ...”

“... reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it ...”

“... of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Granovsky have been published in the West (notably the works by Edward Braun and Béatrice Picon-Vallin): but nothing on quite this scale has appeared for many years – perhaps not since Joseph Gregor and the historian René Fülöp-Miller produced their Das Russische Theater in Vienna in 1928. The subject is still ...”

“... I know bitterly criticise the IRA, then suddenly, but it’s linked, he shifts to describing how a young IRA man was ambushed near an arms dump: ‘The whole town’ heard him pleading with the soldiers for mercy before he was shot.’ ‘Is that so?’ I say, a polite nothing that hides a confused mulch of attitudes – rule of law, Gibraltar, squaddies, seen ...”

“... a pneumatic drill. But I’ve arranged to collect a book from the Stage Door: the only borrowable Edward III in Stratford. It’s a rainbow copy of The Shakespeare Apocrypha, scribbled over by John Barton when he was at King’s, with blacklead for Shakespeare, green for Greene and, jokily, orange for Peele. This is the good thing about ‘Shall I ...”

“... being British’. Hosking knew that they already had a reputation for being ‘unusually intrepid young women’ in this huge country with its ‘very small white population’. Hosking felt that the white European men in Africa admired the women’s ‘spirit’ and their working so far from home and always seemed ‘delighted’ to be asked to drive them ...”

“... the Kaiser would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal Government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who does the best he can to defend Kipling against his detractors, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’, but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in ...”

“... ghastly, venal sister-in-law, seeing the growing attachment between Elinor and her brother, Edward, observes to Elinor’s mother that Edward must find a wealthy or noble wife. There will be trouble for ‘any young woman who attempted to draw him in’. The implication (Elinor is ...”

“... cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them that he ‘was ...”