“... sake of a bypass. Some miles outside Barnstaple down a very muddy lane live my friends Charles and Pamela Gott. Charles and I have been friends for almost sixty years. Indeed, he is almost my only surviving Oxford friend, as distinct from acquaintance. Our mutual affection has remained un-dimmed since the time when we first met at Oxford and ...”

“... visited Denver Ducis for the first time. Lord Peter assures her that the drive is indeed a mile long, that there are deer in the park, and that peacock do strut upon the terrace. As he observed, ‘all the story-book things are there.’ Similar scenes, evocative rather than detailed, abound in Buchan and Brett Young, in Waugh and Wodehouse: their ...”

“... One of these books is very long and the other is very short. Each in its own way is a wonderful piece of work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality ...”

“... have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime ...”

“... died. The second, Anne, was born with a hare lip and a cleft palate, and had the first of a long series of operations when she was only two weeks old. By 1914 Humbert had been transferred a step upwards to William Beveridge’s new Labour Exchange Department, the inception of social security in Britain. Rejected (because of his weak lungs) by the ...”

“... the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother.’ The children’s mother hung an academic gown in the window as a makeshift flag of mourning. Their father, Milman ...”

“... Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of limited means, liable to be snubbed or dropped. Flexible though each may have been, there were different levels in the upper social hierarchy of ...”

“... Extinction Rebellion, several of whose UK members are fashion designers, has advocated a year-long boycott of new clothes buying and in September held a ‘funeral for fashion week’. The designer Katharine Hamnett, who has long backed radical reforms to labour practices and the sourcing of materials, believes that ...”

“... tone of the novels – which they shared with Evelyn Waugh’s novels, though in a minor key. Pamela Flitton comes to mind as an ATS driver at the War Office, with her ‘Stuff the Ambassador’, or the picture of her, ‘standing by the car, surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and despair’. I wish the old note were sounded again in these ...”

“... scandalous: very few people, and even fewer academics, ever publicly admit to being bored by long novels, to skimming them, or to skipping to passages which seem more interesting. Samuel Johnson’s admission that there were few books he felt compelled to read all the way through might license us to think of the length of Richardson’s novels as an ...”

“... Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby ...”

“... on the inner life from the Puritan tradition of spiritual self-inspection? Why were Richardson’s long and in some ways cumbrous novels – which were both enabled and constrained by their epistolary form – so successful? There was nothing parochial about Watt’s inquiries, despite the modest focus announced in his subtitle. In trying to pin down the ...”

“... architectural historians and fans of the aristocracy; Jessica, known as Decca, is the communist. Pamela, once satirised in Private Eye as ‘Doreen: the unknown Mitford sister’, was the only one never to make international news, her lesbianism causing no more than a local disturbance. They were all monsters, sacred monsters at times, but monstrous ...”

“... 113 and 112 numbered fragments, not one of which contains paragraph breaks, many less than a page long – citations included – producing, at the bottom of each dense block of text, an area of blank space. ‘An illustrator named Pere Joan told me the important thing with comics was to know how to read the white space between the panels,’ Mallo writes at ...”

“... in 1954 in the Proceedings of La Société Néo-Philologiquc de Helsinki. The English, who had long realised that it was wrong to say ‘toilet’, were now supplied with lists of shibboleths with which to torment one another. (Addicts of the joke will be interested to observe that in per-Noblesse Oblige letters, there are many non-U usages, such as ...”