“... of concrete detail, often signalled by parentheses and the rule of three: ‘festive pastels (mint green, rancho pink, milky desert blue)’, ‘prescription medications (Roitman, Andrea, alprazolam .25 mg)’. And there’s the odd misfiring poeticism (‘Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor’). Yet a lot of the writing is formidably ...”

“... I accepted it … I walked the Paris streets under the rainbow glory of the lamps, walked on night-green grass and over pavements shining like diamonds.’ This is from The Philistines (1949): ‘She shivered a little in the chilly young air of the day … All sensation was beautiful, even to the movement of a finger, the flutter of a lash … Having doubted ...”

“... had worked earlier, Pevsner contributed a series called ‘Treasure Hunt’ under the pseudonym Peter F.R. Donner (in theory, to disguise how much of every issue he was writing himself). Still very much the architectural historian, with his references to the style of decorative motifs and examination of plan types, he turned his attention to everyday ...”

“... Oswald Mosley (whom she always called TPOL, The Poor Old Leader) in her early novel Wigs on the Green. ‘I don’t quite know what an Aryan is.’ ‘Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’ Mosley banned her from his home ...”

“... readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and innumerable similar childhood favourites: this is the last place one would expect to encounter a jealous quarrel about the nature of referentiality. On the actual island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, blockaded during a ...”

“... a red rose, how do you know it’s really red, and why might we think that blue is closer to green than red? ‘Say what you really think,’ he told his students, and ‘don’t try to be intelligent.’ The classes often ‘felt like the day of judgment’, as one awestruck participant put it, but they continued successfully year after year. Broad had ...”

“... Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the street because she was a kind of conduit’.It isn’t surprising that it took time to catch on. It ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... is a derivative literariness that projects its own tittering onto the subject: the giggling, gray-green roar that fills a gorge (sweet Thames! run softly) old books refer to as the   vale of Tempe ... Eliotic echoes of that calibre belong (sec above) to journalism. For all her reputation as a poet, Clampitt frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of ...”

“... Charlotte, Blanche, Helen, Jackki, Jorie and the exquisite Mabs, ‘a manicurist with a small green scorpion tattoo’. Several of Carstairs’s lovers were black, though none, as it happened, Bahamian: in her intimate life Carstairs preferred the sophisticated women she encountered on annual holidays in New York and the Riviera to local beauties. No such ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... selling second-hand furniture at a flea market, proved a comfortable base. With his red hair, green eyes and pale complexion, al-Suri passed easily for a European and soon enough he was one: in 1987 he married Elena Moreno Cruz, a left-wing student of philology who converted to Islam and helped him become a Spanish citizen. They moved to Granada and began ...”

“... have not attended to the ‘current tendency’, Ludmilla Jordanova stamps her foot in the Bethnal Green Museum: ‘Social differences in clothing are not mentioned, nor are prices given. In fact, a number of the cases clearly contain expensive, hand-made or exclusive clothes. To imply that all children at a given time – the cases are structured by period ...”

“... resent is that most of Shelley’s poems – except for ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which might have been written by a good Augustan – were written by Julian rather than by Maddalo. Such readers have always wanted ‘heard melodies’ to sound for ‘those unheard’, and they deride as spiritual vanity any apparently ...”