“... only went inside a couple of times, probably dared by my brother, Alexander. Daddy always walked straight past it. A bit further on, next to a lock, there was an even smaller pillbox, but I never got beyond putting my foot in the doorway.When we asked Daddy what these pillboxes were for, he said they had been put there during the war in case the Germans ...”

“... you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can amaze students ...”

“... Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest survive. The historian Michael Wood has ingeniously argued that the lyrics of ‘Woods, Rocks & Mountains’ are suggested by the wilderness setting of the Cardenio story and have some parallels with phrases in Shelton’s Quixote. He thinks the song was performed at the point in ...”

“... homily, a quasi-secular point in the mass. But it didn’t work out that way. A protester called Michael Petrelis stood up on a pew and started shouting. Another activist, Tom Keane, received the host, then impulsively crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Schulman was in the cathedral that day, although she doesn’t use her experience as a lens through ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... windows with a baseball bat. Far from being restored to the maternal embrace, Teddy was returned straight to boarding school. ‘I was told I was so dangerous to [Teddy] that I shouldn’t even spend time with him on vacations,’ Agee recalled. Bollinger sued for custody and eventually won.Some years later, Agee and a fellow Sullivanian called Paul Sprecher ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... sign them back in. The system didn’t allow that. There was nothing to do but put the parts straight in the skip. Under RPI-X, there was a big incentive for managers to root out such practices. But there was no need for them to pass on the gains to customers in the form of lower prices, or to invest them in research and new plant. As long as they kept ...”

“... unit labour costs in Germany actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. With devaluation now barred, the Mediterranean countries are suffering a drastic loss of competitiveness that augurs ...”

“... calls his novel ‘a comedy of manners’ because it treats of people who have been brought up ‘straight’, as it were, and who need a high justification for dirtying their hands. One of the diverting and absorbing features of the book is its fascination with the WASP aesthetic. Not for nothing was OSS, the precursor of the CIA, known during its wartime ...”

“... for his white-heat liking, a men’s club mentality that he never really outgrew. And mostly a straight men’s club at that, if the patronising reference to ‘that nice faggot John Ashbery’ is any indication.) For such an aspirer at such a time, with the entire world engulfed in war, beautiful miniatures – glass menageries – were out of the ...”

“... of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed …And to Kenneth Snelson and Michael Sonnabend in summer 1959: ‘Just coming around roads, some place, and having sensation of a piece of it, a piece of nature, like a fence, something on the road.’I do think it is important that the thing about his experience of landscape which de ...”

“... fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin TV screen. The days of word counts, deadlines, kill fees, dud plays were behind me. From now on I would spend my literary life alternating between writing novels and adapting them for the silver ...”