“... Grayshott was home, or home away from home, to the Hilltop set, a group that included Conan Doyle, Shaw, Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. The town was modern, fashionably suburban and connected by a new railway line to London, just close enough for something of fashion and suggestions of sex. Richard Le Gallienne, one of Aubrey Beardsley’s friends, ‘raced ...”

“... at himself. As a caricaturist he was wholly good-natured. Hart-Davis includes a marvellous one of Shaw, flashing a set of new teeth: Shaw, who had previously kept his mouth closed because of his bad teeth, was delighted by it. The most sinister is of a Mr Bernard Posno, a bon viveur and member of the Orleans Club, a select ...”

“... six days after the Woolwich bombing. Were it not for the need to get Hill convicted of the Shaw killing in Belfast in order to weaken further any defence he was to offer to the Guildford charges, these trials would probably have been over in weeks rather than months. This is not the timetable of detection: it is the timetable of LA Law, a scenario in ...”

“... signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... legible plane, all to the point and on the nose. Kennard, who trained as a painter at the Byam Shaw and Slade art schools in the 1960s, rejected both the gallery system and the theoretical turn among his generation – though he shares something with 1970s conceptualism when he says that he thinks of his montages as sentences. The impression is that each ...”

“... terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as Henry Salt and Bernard Shaw (born in, respectively, 1851 and 1856), whose rational and essentially political thinking on the subject was grounded in the recognition that animals have rights. Neither does Mr Turner emphasise the essential point that sensibility, old or new, co-exists ...”

“... poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ...”

“... she wouldn’t be at all disturbed or shocked. The fundamental part of his appeal, as the critic John Barber observed, ‘was both to mirror and to indulge the middle-class fear of sex’. Rattigan’s own father – their relations form another subtext in most of the plays – was a famous roué who had been eased out of the Foreign Office for ...”

“... First came the monied retirees, who triggered off the real-estate boom (this is the background to John D. MacDonald’s underrated Condominium). Secondly, the mind-boggling sums of money generated by middle-class America’s insatiable appetite for prohibited cocaine. Thirdly, the invasion by criminal classes educated in villainy outside the US – in ...”

“... zone when she is shot by a frontier guard. Before this I had tried Reds, a film allegedly about John Reed. This film had only normal intercourse. It also had a good deal of political nonsense and little hint that Reed wrote the finest account there is of the Bolshevik revolution. I have been cured of film-going for a long time. I have not done much better ...”

“... Shortly before he died in 1922, John Butler Yeats wrote an angry, defensive letter to his eldest son William. W.B. Yeats had published a memoir in the Dial and his father objected to the almost parenthetical mention in one episode of an ‘enraged’ Yeats family. The remark unleashed in him a long-restrained irritation, prompting an impassioned defence of his daughters ...”

“... about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did.’ Foster has had the benefit of John Kelly’s magnificent, though all too slowly emerging, edition of the correspondence, and has himself done herculean work in the archives. Among his chief sources is of course Yeats’s own ‘disingenuous’ prose masterpiece, the Autobiographies. For this ...”

“... of their role reversal. He also assists reluctantly at the local animal clinic run by Bev Shaw, whom he describes as a ‘remarkably unattractive’ middle-aged woman. The rape is committed by three black strangers, two men and a boy, who force their way into Lucy’s house one afternoon. They also shoot her kennelled dogs, then douse Lurie with ...”

“... a disadvantage to be misunderstood.’ And even when he is not genial, he is very funny. ‘Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.’ George Moore ‘is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty’. Wells ‘is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night ...”

“... movement. Cheyette traces the Disraelian influence on the ‘imperial Gothic’ fiction of John Buchan and, more controversially, borrows August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British ...”