“... to put on the shelf next to The Good Companions and Angel Pavement. As such, Where the rivers meet may well, in part, please admirers of those once popular middlebrow monuments. Peter, ‘a member of the upper working class from a background still semi-rural’ (his parents run a pub at Oseney, on the edge of Oxford), is a bright lad whose brightness is ...”

“... shimmering and turbaned place, cooled only by the tutelary presence of Saint Peggy Ashcroft. These may be our preferred Indias, the Indias of spice and hokum, but they are a far, mendacious cry from the country modern Indian writers want to tell us about. Bapsi Sidhwa tells of a time and place of civil unrest, of wrecked friendships and betrayals of trust, of ...”

“... latest cultural currents has always been one of the best reasons for keeping up with her work. It may be that histories of the novel yet to be written will see this as one of the first to look back in tranquillity on the work of feminism. To look back on it, but not down on it – Cat’s Eye knows itself to be founded on what feminism has done. In the lives ...”

“... to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they ...”

“... to Mansfield throughout as Katherine) points out that she is ‘of the same sex as my subject. It may be nonsense to believe that this gives me any advantage over a male biographer. Yet I can’t help feeling that any woman who fights her way through life on two fronts – taking a traditional female role, but also seeking male privileges – ...”

“... artist and as a person, and this despite the fact that her biography aims to allay such doubts. It may seem odd to ask whether a poet whose mind was an inexhaustible source of sparkling similes and metaphors had a rich inner life; but Stainton evidently has her misgivings about Lorca’s natural frivolity. She takes more note than Gibson of his disastrous ...”

“... more often floury or waxy than glazed; the objects are solidly there, sparingly translucent. They may glow, they do not glitter. Matisse had to have the real thing – girl or oyster – in front of him when he painted. And it had to be fresh: for one still-life he renewed his oysters every day and had a boy on hand to water the fish for another. The results ...”

“... sickness – ‘Did you think missionaries always were bright and happy and hopeful? Well, there may be some of that kind but they are not out here’ – and in 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, she, her husband and their daughter were all killed, seemingly by Government troops. The East travelled to the West, though not in any missionary spirit, when ...”

“... that while sea ice moves with the wind, the deep-keeled icebergs move with the current, and so may plough a course through the frozen surface. Ships may seek out the wake of an iceberg and take advantage of this passage through open water. A polar bear’s understanding of ice has been honed and refined over thousands of ...”

“... Parsons of Grub Street I would like to point out that this is not my third, but my 19th book. May I also express a fogeyish surprise at seeing myself described as ‘Ernest’ in the headline. I first started writing headlines 70 years ago, but in my time we did not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ‘Sidney Goes to the Gallows’ and ...”

“... highest thing to be, he later inserts as a quasi-aside the thought that a writer’s earliest work may contain, ‘sometimes in coded ways’, the emotions and impulses that will always govern him. The important, overt indication as to what those emotions and impulses are, and what causes Naipaul’s hostility to ‘Islam’, comes earlier on when he visits ...”

“... to them as a source of divine blessing’. They agreed and solemnly recorded their pious hopes: May our children and descendants in the future be guided by the same aim, so that with the constant maintenance of unity the House of Rothschild may blossom and grow into full ripeness ... and ...”

“... in the winter months at least. Come April, a locum had to be found. As a family, the Graces may well have been as loud and competitive in the house as they habitually were on the field, and some of their suburban neighbours found them coarse – ‘Mrs Grace does say such things,’ one wrote in her diary, without, though, telling us what they ...”

“... the shape of new interpretations has yet to crystallise. What happened to the Soviet Union in 1991 may be characterised as a revolution – not in the sense of a spontaneous popular movement overturning the old regime (which it certainly wasn’t), but in the sense of an abrupt political, economic and ideological transformation as sweeping in its impact and ...”

“... for making enemies. According to his Times obituarist, he was underrated and misunderstood, which may well be true. He was certainly hard-working, relentless, and a man of principle. Perhaps the fairest one-liner, coined when he was still only Solicitor-General, was that his mind was a very blunt instrument which could sometimes be found pointing in the right ...”