“... of place in an Edwardian saga. Woolf had once been quite ready to forgive ‘masterly’ Walter Scott for the ‘dull sermons’ in Old Mortality because everything in that book is ‘so much in keeping’. Boredom, after all, is woven into the ebb and flow of non-being out of which moments of being arise. One duly does, about halfway through the ...”

“... cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first choice as administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, soon after taking command, purged its website entry on climate change. (More than a year later, if you go to epa.gov/climatechange you are told the page is still being ‘being updated’ to ‘reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of ...”

“... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times at home. Their Glaswegian father John’s business putting up electric party illuminations in the gardens of the West London gentry never recovered from the blackouts after the zeppelin raids, and the financial help the family got from his wife’s father, a one-time miner turned wealthy ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... taught too, for a time. What she wanted, she says fiercely, was to live.One day she is teaching Scott Fitzgerald, the scene where the murderer finds Gatsby in the pool. Raw sunlight and scarcely created grass, the old warm world. She admired the passage and made dutiful notes on it.But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved simplicity ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an ...”

“... central to their ideas of modern art. They were meat and drink to Whitman, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who wrote of a world delivered from ‘traditions regarding style and the right subjects to be handled’, and of an ‘emancipation of the intellect by modern science and the enfranchisement of the individual by new political ...”

“... larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone reader, it is inseparable from the character-space of the novel, and its ...”

“... of a certain sort because, up till then, any book that captured my interest, such as a novel by Scott or Dickens, or by Kingsley or Harrison Ainsworth, or even by the much despised and now completely forgotten Jeffrey Farnol, whose daintiness deeply offended me, I would pick up, and starting on page 1, I would race through it as fast as my eyes could carry ...”