“... of things by reading: ‘I stuck things up on the wall, things from the books I was reading, pithy little sayings and ... just statements; but sometimes they were hard going, a lot of them were.’ The blinks and fidgets of the man’s mind are caught in the finesse of the punctuation (of which Kelman is a master). His painful lack of the analytic language he ...”

“... reading (Browning, Chesterton, Poe) and details appointments with the people he needed to know: Arthur Waley at the British Museum, a guide in his versions of Chinese and Persian poetry; Akhmatova’s friend Boris Anrep, who made the mosaic on the floor of the National Gallery; C.R.W. Nevinson, the painter whom everyone needed to know; and Ottoline Morrell ...”

“... stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a book society, a cricket ...”

“... paper’, and he was devoted to York Cottage, Sandringham, which Nicolson derided as ‘a horrid little house’, worse than an unseemly villa in Surbiton. ‘For seventeen years,’ Nicolson disparagingly recorded in his diary while working on the King’s early married life, ‘he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.’ But taste and ...”

“... not cut much Parliamentary ice.’) There is an interesting memorandum here from 1955 by Sir Arthur Benson, the governor of Northern Rhodesia, which claims that most Africans would support Britain’s policy against the nationalists if Britain would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Ian Smith took the same general line in 1965, just before the ...”

“... to the spirit of their age. Sometimes this passes back into tradition, and perhaps alters it a little.’ There is an ancient thread linking both Silkys, but each of them appears in garb specific to their time. This is typical of fairies, who are notorious shapeshifters. Their mutability has allowed them to survive, dodging censure by reinventing ...”

“... of such lending that undid Northern Rock. As the American sociologists Bruce Carruthers and Arthur Stinchcombe pointed out in the journal Theory and Society in 1999, market liquidity – plentiful borrowing and lending, or buying and selling – ‘is, among other things, an issue in the sociology of knowledge’. Believable market ...”

“... as Disraeli, but it has never struck me as incongruous for a writer to do so. Perhaps all this has little to do with my novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, except that the book happened to be my first published novel. There was some uncertainty as to whether or not the book would be published at all, and though I don’t suppose there would have been any ...”

“... with the supernatural. Rather, he believed in a divine universe whose perpetual unfolding left little room for demons. His heliocentric scheme came from observation, but also formed an image of the Holy Trinity with God as the sun, Christ as the stars and the Holy Spirit as the intervening space. Kepler’s astronomy did not seek to disenchant the ...”

“... ingredients and trigger reactions in the nervous system, including ‘a tingling freshness, a little frisson of an electric sparkle’. Aldehydes were still novel in the perfume industry of the 1920s, and certainly in the amounts used in Chanel No. 5, and were thought by aficionados to contribute the perfume’s characteristic champagne quality ...”

“... wrote, not about life in the lower depths, but about her work in the movies, and if she wrote very little, she wrote very well, with an acute critical intelligence, and much showing-off. She was a culture vulture, an intellectual snob, an autodidact – good for her! Although her life spiralled downwards, like Lulu’s, no victim, she. She ...”

“... raises no objections; and in no time the pair are married. Adamson’s life, however, is very little changed by the gratification of his greatest desire. Husband and wife continue to live at Bredely; Adamson continues to feel a less than free and accepted member of the family, and finds himself performing the same duties as before. Plans for a return to ...”

“... in Mein Leben as one of Wagner’s mistresses in his years of exile. But in Mein Leben there is little of the dark side. What we find instead is a very characteristic early 19th-century hero: a kind of Lucien de Rubempré, leaping from misfortune to extravagant fortune and then falling again, running at full pace up and down metaphorical mountains (as well ...”

“... In Lady Oracle, the Canadian heroine takes refuge in the Roman Campagna after a faked suicide. Little of consequence happens to her there, and the emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the gradual unfolding of the episodes of her earlier life. In Bodily Harm, a woman journalist arrives in a Caribbean island to write a travel feature. But an intrigue ...”

“... is the history of the Templars, whose legendary Grand Masters were to Languedoc and Provence what Arthur is to Wessex. One aspect of Durrell’s ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in ...”