“... The Frenchman recalled a letter they’d composed after a consultation with the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen. ‘Could you tell Mr Arthur Andersen …’ it began. Andersen, the firm’s founder, had died in 1947. ‘They didn’t have a clue,’ the Frenchman said. They got a clue pretty quickly, however, and homed in ...”

“... Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or at least a mini-series. (Please, no one do this.)The fact ...”

“... In his​ History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... characteristic ‘Johnsonian common sense’ broke through. Reading the Memoir gives tantalisingly little enlightenment as to how such tortured works as Maud or In Memoriam came to be. But Hallam Tennyson is the source for almost all the illustrative anecdotes and biographical narrative which subsequent writers are obliged to use. There will always be, it ...”

“... one? Kipling offered his own explanation for his silence in Something of Myself: ‘Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.’ Seymour-Smith finds ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”