“... atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham. It is these antecedents which bring out the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not ...”

“... sure Mr Cameron has to hand. Dead smart.14 September. Watch, though without intending to, J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, without intending to, I suppose, because I never feel Alastair Sim’s performance in the film can be bettered. Tonight it’s David Thewlis who’s very very good, bleak, unmannered and while I miss some of Sim’s silkiness ...”

“... At such moments Enright clothes his writing in tweeds and brogues and begins to sound like J.B. Priestley at the wartime microphone: ‘In their new books’ Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll ‘have both turned into what in my childhood were called “worrits”. Since we can worry well enough for ourselves, and in any case lack no assistance or guidance ...”

“... do if you were going to be a film star, but which applied to literature too, the success of J.B. Priestley and, at a later date, John Braine evinced by their brisk departure from their Bradford birthplace. In this respect the Brontë Sisters (Mam had seen the films, though she’d not read the books) were thought to be tragic figures, not on account of their ...”

“... as a putatively vast pornographic poem, and about Eliot’s first marriage. I once heard J.B. Priestley explaining that the Eumenides in The Family Reunion were a direct representation of Vivien(ne), which I couldn’t understand since in the play only Harry sees them (‘You don’t see them, but I see them,’ he claims), whereas ...”

“... does not even raise his eyes from his papers, behaviour of this nature being presumably what his job has led him to expect. Yorkshire, 15 March. Having seen there was a Bronze Age stone circle (more accurately the remains of a barrow) at Yockenthwaite I look at the map and see what I take to be a narrow and presumably little-used road over from Hawes. It’s ...”

“... by Hartley with a psychology which permitted self-conscious development, and popularised by Priestley as a divinely ordained instrument of improvement, ‘pliable man’ stepped forward for inspection. No effort was spared to ensure his supersession of earlier, less malleable models. The dominance of nurture rather than nature in fashionable educational ...”

“... religious quarrels was not with the Anglicans Davies and Chelsum, but with the Unitarian Joseph Priestley, who employed a history of Christian doctrine very like Gibbon’s own to prophesy the imminent fall of all civil powers that had committed the heresy of maintaining state-established churches. Gibbon knew enthusiasm when he saw it, and the age of ...”

“... but have, Raven says, ‘a definite if narrow homosexual streak’; there are boys with jobs as shop-walkers or as ‘low-grade couturiers’ which give them notions of sophistication, and they have no ‘uneasy conscience’ about their sex work. There are poor and unintelligent boys; there are layabouts; and there are the full-time ...”

“... her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties”.’ Eva Larkin was 79 at the time so that to see herself presiding over the Pick’n’ Mix counter was a little unrealistic and her chances of ...”