“... hostility, especially from those whose children had failed the 11+ or were thought likely to do so. While most conceded that they were indeed good schools, such good, it was argued, was outweighed by the damage they did to the majority who went instead to those symbols of failure, the secondary moderns. The 1944 Act thus left England with a state school ...”

“... strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think, actually shouting at myself, but ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1975, as America’s war in Vietnam drew to its grim conclusion, a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue ...”

“... at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’...”

“... Juárez is very calm. Boring even. We used to have fifteen or twenty deaths a day. Now it’s just three, five, seven.’ The term ‘boring’ is relative. The first cover of PM that I see shows a photograph of a corpse whose head is no more than a skull: the man was burned with acid ‘while still alive’, the article says. It gives the usual ...”

“... from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book ...”

“... hard-to-get nutrients. Illusions as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions ...”

“... my dirty things into the hamper. Why’re you frowning?’ he asked. ‘I’m doing it for you, so you won’t have to do it in the morning. I thought you’d be pleased.’ ‘I’m wondering why you should all at once be doing something to please me.’ ‘Because it just occurred to me, all at once.’ She made a face at the dog, stuck out her tongue ...”

“... afternoon I go round to start the lengthy process of clearing out some of the books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room ...”

“... Bank of England set out to calculate a figure that does more than any other to shatter banking’s preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared ...”

“... idea that we might go on holiday. In any event, we did eventually go on holiday – to Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness – and the Moon came along very loyally. I was getting into poetry and the Moon was becoming a thing to conjure with for the solo flier. At Skegness, I sat on the edge of a fountain with a neon sign behind me which said: ‘Our True ...”

“... if not non-existent. As a money-making enterprise, writing makes no sense. According to the UK’s official graduate careers website, prospects.ac.uk (a depressing but entirely reliable source, to which I direct my own eager students when they come to me for advice before wisely becoming arts administrators, baristas, or hedge-fund managers), the annual ...”

“... on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man. An unaccompanied woman could only attend a matinée. At ...”

“... published as Anticipations. His friend Arnold Bennett referred to them mockingly as ‘Uncle’s-dissipations’, but for Wells futurology was anything but a sideline. In fact he was tempted to regard the scientific romances and humorous journalism with which he had made his mark in the Nineties as little more than dissipations. 1900 was not a peaceful ...”

“... indeed we are all Ruritanians now. These fears weren’t formulated in response to George Konrad’s hefty new book, but they might have been. I don’t know when I last felt so mutinous while reading a book. A Feast in the Garden is an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and ...”