“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained account into ...”

“... you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.’ Dead on all sides, graves, funeral processions, widows, children growing up a parent short, jails, human rights abuses and no united Ireland at the end of it all. Why this addiction to failure? Surely Republicanism has to be more imaginative than that. So what lies behind the ...”

“... Moore, for instance – very little survives here; even the more familiar ones, like Michael Graves, are relatively defamiliarised within this extraordinarily overpopulated meteorological zone). The 24 ‘works’ – project descriptions, actually – range from interior decoration (the Branson Coates Arca di Noe restaurant in Sapporo) to Beth Gali’s ...”

“... like a feudal grandee with black vipers writhing round his head, presiding over a field of burning graves from the battlements of a castle. Where, we are beginning to ask ourselves, are the happy or at least hard-working families? Where are the fishermen and reapers at work on blue seas or golden fields, the lovers adoring each other, the ecstatic dancers or ...”

“... or even decently industrious,’ Clovis says, ‘I go to Kensal Green and look at the graves of those who died in business.’ Sometimes his smart talk is too much for the ladies. ‘I must be going,’ says a Mrs Eggleby, ‘in a tone which had been thoroughly sterilised of even perfunctory regret’. And a Lady Caroline, bound for a ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and ...”

“... Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to command serious media attention was Peter Ackroyd, a meticulously re-invented Man of Letters. The others, until Ben Watson elbowed his way onto the scene, have had to settle for a succès d’estime, quasi-academic projects with spin (such as the provocative series edited by Denise Riley for ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... will be accompanied by biographical information about the author. Underneath Robert Graves’s ‘Symptoms of Love’, for instance, we learn this: ‘Scientists have recently classified love as a form of psychosis. Robert Graves knew all about this. The poet once threw himself out of a third-floor window ...”

“... a hit-or-miss physician; Sir Bonus MacScrip, venal member for the borough of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who ...”

“... that he experience having his arse shot off. I just note that he didn’t’; ‘when you compare Graves with Wordsworth or Rilke you are comparing a rearrangement of the room with a subsidence of continents’; of the 1987 hurricane to a contributor in California: ‘every second tree in the square is on its knees’). In that sense he was the object of a ...”

“... law notion of open adversarial justice, and it is soon to end; but I recall that it was only when Peter Taylor became Lord Chief Justice in 1992 that our own criminal appeal court began letting the defence see the case summaries prepared by the court’s officials. Things which you have lived with tend to seem unproblematical until you change them; then you ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”