“... American culture, began to favour the notion of identity being constructed on the basis of wounds. David Kessler, who was Kübler-Ross’s co-author on her last two books, proposes that the same stages are present in every experience of loss, not just death but divorce, moving house and changing jobs. From here it’s not much of a stretch to the Onion story ...”

“... only accepts readies: good, dirty, plague-carrying cash; folding paper portraits of folk you’d prefer to keep out of your pockets.When a couple of art sympathisers drifted in, they were sent off to a filling station on Grove Road to find coins. Back in the Sunday spread of Victoria Park, the original people’s park, where multicultural street fare ...”

“... solar hat and khaki uniform that Beerbohm has Kipling wear in one of his caricatures were not yet de rigueur. There are early portraits depicting Englishmen with their Indian wives, dressed in a mish-mash of Persian and Hindu styles. In the first half of the 19th century, the Fort William College, later the Hindu College, saw teacher and ...”

“... then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or ...”

“... from Westminster, maam.’ ‘And you are …?’ ‘Norman, maam. Seakins.’ ‘And where do you work?’ ‘In the kitchen, maam.’ ‘Oh. Do you have much time for reading?’ ‘Not really, maam.’ ‘I’m the same. Though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book.’ Mr Hutchings smiled ...”

“... in 1939. But often they were small and private. In my own family, 1944 wasn’t remembered for D-Day but as ‘the summer we went along the Roman Wall on the tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a ...”

“... The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers were now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marshes, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their Rigid ...”

“... the end of a hard day’.Pym’s comedies are disenchanted romances. Her spinsters often marry but do so with their eyes open. Men, they realise, are best treated as children – helpless and often peevish. Eligible bachelors and widowers with Victorian names – Aylwin, Everard, Marius – are blithe egotists: Fabian Driver in Jane and Prudence leaves his own ...”

“... titles as ‘Man’ (according to a recent HMI report, only 15 per cent of primary-school children do anything called history); in the secondary schools it was promoted, or protected, as a variant of ‘Humanities’ or World Affairs, while for the less able children it was smuggled in under the rubric of ‘social studies’. The status of history was also ...”

“... modern biographers have set out to fill the gap. R.H. Super has delivered his book first; N. John Hall’s and Victoria Glendinning’s Trollopes are still to come. Sportingly, Super subtitles his biography ‘A Life’, leaving open the possibility that this may not turn out to be the life. But at least he has the consolation of being first past the ...”

“... another kind, but a negative one, based on the rejection of the positive model. Thus the story of Dr Aziz and Adela Quested becomes in Scott’s Quartet the story of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners. This story is far more likely to have taken place, in the world of fact, than is the dramatic fantasy divided cunningly into acts, with a catastrophe and a ...”

“... stands at ease, his right arm hanging loosely at his side, the left raised as if he’s about to do something – look at his watch, perhaps? The photograph was taken fifty years ago, on 20 July 1969, and it’s one of the most recognisable photographs from the Apollo missions, among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between ...”

“... borrowit and to the blis can go: Chryst with his blud our ransonis dois indoce: Surrexit dominus de sepulchro. Or energetically and abusively in the paradoxical mode of controlled emetic known as flyting: Mauch muttoun, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous, Rank beggar, ostir dregar, flay fleggar in the flet. Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, lik ...”