“... Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats has set out from its publishers with claims beyond even what one expects of conventional hype. There is much to admire in the book, particularly the industry that must have gone into its compilation: the examination of huge family archives which contain, apart from what one might expect in the way of letters and journals, everything from death certificates to poems ...”

“... for ‘not allowing your daughter to read it’, but I am inclined to believe now that it was not so much the sex as its outspoken message against war that caused the fuss. It was the first successful book – Barbusse’s Le Feu had been published in England but not widely read – to come down fair and square against ...”

“... way to Ventura Freeway, the 101, that leads to a valley of shopping malls and awesome haze. It’s out here that you find Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks. And this is where the world’s most spoiled people come to breed and crave in an atmosphere of dieting and reality TV. Alexis Neiers was 17 in 2008. Her ...”

“... expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand. To tell you the truth, I have not opened a copy of it in this century.” Perhaps he was the typical reader we were ...”

“... years but stories that they were created overnight by hosts of angels are scarcely less credible, so extraordinary is their beauty and the fact of their construction; four of them are strictly monolithic, attached to the rock only at their bases. Hermits were crawling out of the crevices, toppling skulls and bones and jostling with beggars, priests and ...”

“... cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ‘In Search of Valentino’s Slightly Cauliflowered Left Ear’. Ear, queer: the proof of ...”

“... presses and rigs in the basements of engineering schools. The desire to play at building comes not so much from memories of the look of things as from memories of movement: memories as clear as the memories of smells or sounds, and sometimes more dramatic. One of my earliest is the shudder, pause, then the next shudder of an earthquake. Crockery rattled on the ...”

“... written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making technologies that seemed mature have changed and expanded their reach. In 1950 we lived in an image flood. We are now, as Bell puts it, in an image jam. As you turn the pages of Mirror ...”

“... New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on 20 April and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies ...”

“... enough to turn into legend: that he died in the Aegean and not a ditch in Northern France helped; so did his burial on the island of Skyros, where Achilles lived and Theseus was killed; so did the speed with which his death followed on the publication of his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which ...”

“... The first sentence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is one of the most memorable openings in all literature: ‘After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow. From there he rang Akmatova every day, begging her to come.’ That was in 1934, and in his indispensable Mandelstam, Clarence Brown outlined the circumstances which led to this smack, whose sharp report not only unloosed the avalanche in which the poet Osip Mandelstam perished but also prepared the volcanic action which would begin thirty years later when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sat down to write her memoirs ...”

“... to acknowledge, is strange. It is true that my grandparents were born in Lithuania: my father’s parents in Kovna, my mother’s in Vilna. But they left for America sometime in the early 1890s, and, with a single exception, it was more than a century before anyone in my family returned for a visit. No one seems to ...”

“... directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books. Derick Thomson’s Companion is a response to intensifying interest in Highland culture. It is handsomely illustrated on a wide range of themes, but there is a thoroughness in its approach which makes it more than a tourist souvenir. There are two pages, for instance, of notes on ...”

“... using phrases like ‘collective Arab narrative’ in their conversations with Said at the UN, and David Gilmour, one of the authors under review, is equally improbably described as being frustrated by the ‘non-narrative character of Lebanon’s problems’. Reports of events since the fall of Beirut are described as ...”

“... alleged behaviour of British troops in the trenches during the Little War for the Falklands. It’s surprising, however, that most of his disenchanted fans live not in England but in Spain, where the offending article appeared. Down there they are still writing letters of disapproval – though Spanish readers are not exactly what you could call a race of ...”