“... disliked his parents may have been that his life veered too close to his mother’s fiction. Among Edward Godfree Aldington’s early gestures of rebellion was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... the letdown, you may feel called on to provide some compensatory emotion of your own, like the young TV producer in Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, as she contemplates the Rothko reproductions on her walls: ‘She still felt – or could, if she kept the overhead light off and the posterish flatness of her pictures remained unrevealed, the way ...”

“... is an important, consciously Marxist strand of British postwar playwriting – from John Arden and Edward Bond in the Fifties and Sixties to John McGrath and Howard Brenton in the Seventies and Eighties – which has sought to renew and develop the Brecht project as a whole. But just as there is hardly a line of dialogue in the post-Caretaker British theatre ...”

“... fall,’ they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was ...”

“... is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors ...”

“... In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This ...”

“... work on the Romantic writers, Austen included, has been obsessed with money for over a decade now. Edward Copeland’s Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of ...”

“... led, in due course, to Weaver taking charge of the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the Egoist Press and, eventually, finding a publisher for Ulysses. Woolf’s interest in feminism and Modernism was very different from Marsden’s or Weaver’s. Nonetheless, their independent efforts indicate that there was a natural affinity ...”

“... them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its effects embrace even the bewildered Humberstall – they save his life. The battery is wiped out by enemy action. Humberstall staggers shell-shocked away, muttering about ...”

“... remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan, born in 1886, remembered him being ‘a real companion’ to himself and his brother. He had ‘so much of the child in his own nature that he delighted in playing our ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... led to demands for political reform and military revitalisation. In 1908 the revolt of the Young Turks brought to power a group of officers determined to halt the Empire’s decline. Like the ideologies of similar groups elsewhere – there were coups in Greece, Serbia and Portugal around this time – theirs was a confused amalgam of liberal ...”

“... domination, while inclining heavily towards the latter. Nobody is better qualified than Hugo Young to tell the sad tale of Britain’s fumblings with her neighbours since 1945. As well as having been a close observer of the British and American scene for some thirty years, he seems to have interviewed nearly everybody alive who had much to do with his ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”