“... Jewel and Warriss and Mike and Bernie Winters, to their successors, Cannon and Ball and Little and Large, is undeviating in its reliance on the sparring partnership of an unctuous straight man and a sly, grotesque clown. This is the mode in which Morecambe and Wise began, mimicking the hard-edged wise-guy contentiousness of Abbott and Costello and ...”

“... to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other British travellers and expatriates in the city. This led him to scour printed sources and consult Roman parish ...”

“... looking down, you would see sparks flying up as the tramcars crossed the junctions. It was like little thunderstorms all over the city.’He first met Joan Eardley in Hopetoun Place. ‘She had a little kiddies’ pushchair,’ he said. ‘And she got her easel set up. I was twelve. She was painting one of the ...”

“... Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown. Maudling chatted away amiably – providing damning copy ...”

“... Not long after going down from Oxford he went to Palestine to serve as an aide-de-camp to Sir Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner of the mandated area. He was appalled to find Jews and Arabs at each others’ throats, a situation which he felt the policies of the Administration in which he served exacerbated. The only organisation he could find in which ...”

“... in an apparently futile search for water on the dried-up bed of Lake Kotto, a task in which he has little support from his employer and none at all from the local regime, headed by the thuggish Captain Kagwa. Ballard, as his admirers will know, frequently employs doctor heroes, perhaps the outcome of his own abortive medical career at Cambridge, a vocation ...”

“... to stir some strange and deep passions. What does the evidence actually show about the effect of a little inflation on growth? National growth rates in the European Union are currently in the range of around 1 to 2.5 per cent per year; inflation rates range from zero to around 2.5 per cent. Annual growth rates in East Asia range currently from 4 per cent in ...”

“... popular theme) I found this part of the book unexciting – mostly intelligent summary, with little in the way of new insight. It is sharper on Ford, who is scolded for his statement that the literary market in his time was hostile to writers: ‘I suppose that never before was the financial struggle among the literary classes so bitter and so ...”

“... of his letters may come as a disappointment. When Waugh died in 1966, the outside world possessed little reliable information about the nature of the beast inside the baroque carapace. Only occasionally would the monster come out of his lair: sometimes in print to deride Picasso or Auden, sometimes in person to insult his friends. For all the outside world ...”

“... book, The Governesses, published in France in 1992, began as a short story.* Even now it comes to little more than a hundred pages. Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When ...”

“... genesis and maturing of his story, with special reference to the technical problem of making the little girl the central consciousness of the narrative. ‘The most delightful difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be ...”

“... based on increased in size – a virtual statistical impossibility. When erstwhile Burt admirer Arthur Jensen forth-rightly confirmed and elaborated Kamin’s revelation, most psychologists agreed with his concession that Burt’s results were ‘useless for hypothesis testing’. Furious debate ensued, however, after Oliver Gillie alleged in a 1976 Sunday ...”

“... the British flag across the Pacific: with Cook to his death in Hawaii in 1779, then with Captain Arthur Phillip to the new penal settlement in Botany Bay in 1788. A second copy, rather less worthy, travelled on the Bounty with William Bligh and was taken by the mutineers to Pitcairn Island. Hence Umberto Eco playfully suggests at the end of his own recent ...”

“... Graffiti. In those days the studio system still had power over him: ‘It’s like taking your little kid and cutting off one of her fingers. “It’s only a finger, it’s not that big a deal,” they say. But to me, it’s just an arbitrary exercise of power. And it irritates me enormously.’ Lucas has constructed a professional self which is the ...”

“... are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs my twopenn’orth of praise and whose faults, as revealed over the years, are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate ...”