“... is the reason Icelanders say frið sem álfkona, ‘fair as an elf-woman’, and Anglo-Saxons said ides ælfscinu, ‘elf-fair lady’. But they are dangerous too. Elves are ‘cruel for fun’, Granny Weatherwax says in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (1992) – another hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were ...”

“... in the Sunday hat was telling her grandson the day was too hot for sale or rent. And just as she said this and wiped the backs of her hands with a Wet Wipe, a dog came padding down the opposite sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of ...”

“... sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s ...”

“... is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors ...”

“... Proverbs of Heaven which made it necessary for him to issue some of the other sort. So that when Edward Bond appropriated Blake, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ he vitiated it with his tacit pretence that the prevalence in our day is that everyone is going about nursing unacted desires. Given these contraries, it will ...”

“... July 1945 were given strict instructions to turn their backs on the initial blast. The physicist Edward Teller refused to obey orders. He put on an extra pair of dark glasses under welder’s goggles, smeared his face with ointment, and looked straight at the aim point, not wanting to miss a second of the atomic age. In the decades that followed, Teller ...”

“... is not the whole explanation. Ridley is 14 years older than Major, but 12 years younger than Edward Heath. Whether one had fought in the war seems not to be a decisive criterion. Among the public, however, age does matter, as does class. The middle classes – or the better-educated, for it is difficult to know which is the crucial variable – favour ...”

“... The Admiral was an enthusiastic supporter of Benito Mussolini, and later of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, said Sir Barry, was ‘absolutely terrific; absolutely A1’. Sir Barry persisted in these views with such vigour that when Britain finally declared war on Germany in 1940, he was interned as an enemy agent. MI5 returned to the attack when Attlee came to office ...”

“... appears in his 1946 collection, The Nine Men of Soho: ‘“I’m a conscientious objector,” I said. “I’m frightfully conscientious. I object to everything.”’ The same gift is put to sharper use in Memoirs of the Forties, where Maclaren-Ross describes seeing a graffito in a public lavatory: ‘No lousy Jews or Communists allowed in here.’ ‘One ...”

“... sucked a lemon. Bibliography ‘has been stretched so far beyond all useful limits, and has been said to include such a confusing variety of barely related meanings’; ‘the only sentence in this book in which the words print and culture both appear is this one.’ His work may be of interest, he concedes, to textual and literary scholars – ‘where both ...”

“... in the manner of Uncle Wiz, a name conferred by affectionate friends. This latest instalment of Edward Mendelson’s edition of the Complete Works contains Auden’s prose writings from a mere six years, roughly the poet’s forties. It was preceded by two large volumes covering 1926 to 1938 and 1939 to 1948. The three total more than two thousand pages and ...”

“... to the soap-operatic events taking place in Maybury Hospital, were presented in the person of Dr Edward Roebuck: a recognis – ably shabby figure, fallible but well-meaning, doing his troubled best to help, counsel and advise his patients. Now the American consumer appears to have rumbled what Sir Peter Medawar has termed the most stupendous ...”

“... Every word is recorded. Grant skilfully shows how modes of speech capture attitudes. He quotes Sir Edward Marshall Hall QC, ‘doyen of criminal advocates, in the defence of Madame Fahmy, on trial in 1923 for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy hotel’: She discovered for the first time that he had not only the vilest of vile tempers, but was ...”

“... Trefusis, the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Even better, her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was Edward VII’s official mistress. It may be more than mere chance that the role of maîtresse-en-titre to the Prince of Wales runs in the family. Tyrrel says that, as a child, Camilla not only knew about her ancestor’s liaison but regarded the story as ...”

“... When his book ‘This Blessed Plot’ came out in 1998, Hugo Young said that it was ‘the story of fifty years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid’. Ian Gilmour reviewed the book in the ‘LRB’ of 10 December 1998. What he says seems apposite ...”