“... Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It was, as Barnes pointed out, impossible for Whicker to have missed the item, or the point. Yet on his very next appearance there he was, pacing about and droning horribly and ...”

“... early at the old Baltimore and Potomac depot ...’ (He was, of course, shot: Alexander Graham Bell rigged up an electrical machine which failed to find the position of the bullet.) ‘At about the time the Roentgens were celebrating their last quiet Christmas outside the limelight in 1895, young Tolman Cunnings was losing an argument in a Canadian ...”

“... The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s – rebellious students, civil rights agitators, wild-eyed feminists – for the grievous decline in public morality, cultural literacy, educational standards and everything else that has gone to hell: blame them and not, say, the cultural contradictions of capitalism ...”

“... Plath’s is clear from the use of clothes in her own writing. Watt includes a passage from The Bell Jar but not the one where Plath’s narrator, increasingly unable to inhabit the personality she has tried to assume, comes to resent her fashionable clothes, which take on a ‘separate, mulish identity’. One night she throws them off the roof of her ...”

“... couple who alternate between starving and gorging themselves. (The novel was turned into a film by Alan Parker, starring Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda.) In A Friend of the Earth Boyle turns his squinting attention to environmentalism, creating a disconcerting marriage of farce and prophecy: he doesn’t doubt the looming apocalypse; he merely ...”

“... were born on 13 July 1793, in a thatched tenement on Helpston High Street, next door to the Blue Bell public house. There were two bedrooms and two downstairs rooms: in Clare’s words, his childhood home was ‘as roomy and comfortable as any of our neighbours’. There was an apple tree in the garden, which, Clare says in his autobiography, ‘stood’ his ...”

“... just get on with the job. 31 March. Jehovah’s Witnesses blitz the street and when they ring the bell I lie low until the coast is clear. I imagine they’re used to this sort of response and even when someone is unwary enough to open them the door the exchange is generally pretty curt. In one house in the street, though, they are assured of a warmer ...”

“... a disaster. This is what first bound together Ranelagh’s galère, ranging from Keith Joseph to Alan Walters, from Alfred Sherman to Denis Thatcher: the Institute of Economic Affairs competing the while with Enoch Powell for the role of the enduring spiritual godfather whose time had come. Ranelagh’s book is badly organised. Having begun as an attempt to ...”

“... On 31 August 1939 Alan Cameron was at his desk at the BBC, where he was secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting, when he heard that the British fleet was mobilising. This meant that war with Germany was imminent and Cameron telephoned home to give his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the news. She received it without apparent emotion and with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time ...”

“... book’s opening caption, ‘All grown-ups are paper tigers,’ may have sounded an initial alarm bell about the corruption of the minds of the young; and by the pages on orgasm, intercourse, contraception, molestation and pornography (‘a harmless pleasure if it isn’t taken seriously and believed to be real life … But … you may get some good ideas ...”

“... of Manning’s teens. The Braybrookes tell us that ‘she used to have dreams in which Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia came floating towards her like beautiful swans.’ An assiduous user of the public library, the young Olivia took out Jacob’s Room almost as soon as it arrived there. But her tastes were catholic: Rider Haggard’s Zulu Trilogy ...”

“... a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their molluscs, entomologists their ...”

“... produced such constitutional anomalies as the interruption of legal argument when the division bell rang (something I witnessed more than once as a barrister) so that one or more of the law lords could go and vote in the chamber.It is against this background that Frederic Reynold’s story of what he calls high principle and low politics begins. Reynold, a ...”

“... also, was that it he had lived a more cluttered life then Art, ‘that lifted rough tongued bell’, would cease to chime. When it did cease to chime, rather earlier than he’d thought, ten years or so before he died, he went on living as he’d always lived, saying it was all he knew.Striding down the library in the Monitor film Larkin thought he ...”

“... signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who ...”