“... or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a generation. ‘There were so few of you,’ one of Sayre’s professors recalled nostalgically in 1969, the year of the Harvard strike, ‘it was easy to push you around.’ No wonder ...”

“... Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no doubt to dis-identify ...”

“... whose teenage years had been overshadowed by the First World War. ‘We strain every nerve to keep young,’ Nicky says. ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ his fiancée replies. ‘It probably only means we shan’t live so long.’ The dialogue sets the underlying terrors bouncing off a brightly flippant surface, making no ...”

“... vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... on the street outside. This makes it the ideal target for the heist. Freddie is the wheelman, Arthur ‘the Jackie Robinson of safe-cracking’. Miami Joe, an angry Southerner with an inferiority complex, is the purple-suited mastermind whose motive is ‘monetary gain, and to bring Black Harlem down a notch’. Pepper turns up last in a Wes ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... too far: as he rounds up her livestock in payment of a claim, she grabs his cloak and her two young sons, nobodies with no money or power, wound him mortally. Everywhere else in Europe they would all have swung on a gibbet. In Iceland they got off with losing their farm; but Einarr didn’t get it (they’d lost it already) – the gothar in general must ...”

“... mistrust politicians when they eat with literary men,’ he wrote in 1896, after dining under Arthur Balfour’s chairmanship. Though fascinated by power he was seldom at ease with the powerful. At 22 he had written that, although the Viceroy had been ‘awfully sweet’ when the Saturday Review praised Plain Tales from the Hills, ‘Simla always makes me ...”

“... he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon ...”

“... never lose it and will spread these ideas as they grow up.’ Fisher maintained. This catch-them-young strategy was perhaps too simple. One thing it did not explain was why so many economic liberals were actually converts from left-wing beliefs, which they had maintained in their youth with all the zeal which, belatedly transmuted, turned them into ...”

“... to a basic fabric. Sometimes it is useful, as in the painfully acquired lettering which enabled a young girl to mark the ownership of goods. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous pieces of handwork, the embroidered arms of the alliance which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in ...”

“... from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been widely quoted, notably the insistence by Arthur Lowe (Mainwaring) on having a clause in his contract stipulating that in no scene would he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a ...”

“... plays do survive – Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Davenport’s King John and Matilda, Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, or Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallerstein – and others preserve a sketchy existence through the records of censorship and prosecution. Massinger causes Miss Heinemann some difficulty. She (rightly) contrasts the fundamentally ...”

“... has not annihilated consequence. Or, more precisely, that Aids has reinstated it. Suppose that a young man who knows he is carrying the HIV virus has some sinister reason for sweet-talking the object of his desire into going to bed with him while saying nothing about his medical condition. It would be quite appropriate to call a case of this sort a ...”

“... he can recruit any socialist with a declared belief in Christianity, including Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury and Harold Wilson, and any Christian who has advocated a social role for Christianity – a rubric which would not exclude most modern Popes. If Bryant’s history had been less provincial it might have situated the ‘left ...”