“... Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging the disturbed boy without condescension. ‘Now you will have to write back, as you promised,’ he ...”

“... leadership lasted little more than a decade (and that of his partner, Pelopidas, was also short-lived), but Cartledge’s treatment of the Epaminondas era is the richest chapter in this book, in part because the extant sources are far more extensive. Plutarch, a native of Chaeronea in Boeotia, took a strong interest in his region’s heroes, though he ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... went fishing with my family when i was five’, in which the narrator catches a whale (after nine short lines, the poem repeats ‘the next night we ate whale’ an enormous number of times), for up to seven minutes at a stretch. After the magazine n+1 rejected his stories, he wrote new ones in which characters (occasionally hamsters) had the same name as one ...”

“... own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they wished; and to elect a master and two wardens every ...”

“... mind while the context in which it was written does not. Even the younger generation got in first: Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell (1979) and Michael Foot’s of Aneurin Bevan (1962-73) also long predate Clarke. Cripps’s biographer, as Clarke admits, faces the further problem that the Governments in which Cripps served – and his years as ...”

“... and animal life which is, for most readers, the main memory of the poem as a whole. Its four short books leave you with an impression of huge and uncontainable variety. Moving through ploughing in Book 1, trees and vines in Book 2, large animals in Book 3 and the tiny bees of Book 4, the poem packs in an unassimilable density of sensation and ...”

“... a tailor, a lacemaker, a potter and a jeweller all died better off than the royals they served. Philip Rundell, diamond jeweller by appointment, was a millionaire. The personal assets of Queen Charlotte, his most important customer, were valued at £140,000 – diamonds, presumably, included. Some magnates with the Midas touch ...”

“... Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William ...”

“... implacable and proud of it. When his son, Maurice, wondered why his own career had fallen so far short of his father’s, Macmillan said: ‘Because you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there ...”

“... might very well be supplemented by a highly personalised nickname – Old Tom, Long Tom, Short Tom, or even, according to Rev. Alfred Easther, a 19th-century Yorkshire dialectologist, Wantem, Blackcop and Muddlinpin – it might better be described as an outbreak of name-consumerism, as parents increasingly invested their energies in baptismal ...”

“... be literature after reunification? It strikes one as something of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry ...”

“... who sees an opportunity to reclaim her ex-lover John Pomfret when their children (her son Philip, his daughter Mary) fall in love. Realising that only one of the two possible Weatherby-Pomfret marriages can take place, with one killing off the other, she sets out to sabotage the young couple. Her devious manipulations are horribly plain to the reader ...”

“... outcry of a soul in pain’. He was taking ‘imaginative revenge’ on his father, Philip Gray, a violent man who seems regularly to have beaten Gray’s beloved mother, Dorothy. Ugolino is found in hell gnawing on the skull of his enemy Ruggieri, so Mack wonders whether ‘Gray was inflicting within his mind a suitable vengeance on the ...”

“... is his weakest work even if it was the most immediately successful. He was not a great writer of short fiction. He was a great essayist. Like Montaigne, he had the gift of transforming a moment, a pain, an object, a fleeting thought, into something universal. Like Montaigne, who also lived through murderous times, Levi salvaged a humane, optimistic moral ...”