“... negligent in not spotting that Baker’s adjusted gradient would spoil his splendid vista along King’s Way. But there were many redeeming features: the authentic and unrivalled synthesis of East and West; the brilliant fusion of public grandeur and private domesticity; and the astonishing vision of the massive, horizontal house floating effortlessly on ...”

“... to free the hull.    Later, the mines exploded, destroying the Japanese warship.    The King decorated Magennis at Buckingham Palace in December 1945.    But though he returned to a hero’s welcome from the people of Belfast, he was never officially honoured in the city of his birth.    After a string of menial jobs, he was forced to sell ...”

“... He maintains that the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Irgun Zvi Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin; the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident, and Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, by Jewish extremists long preceded that of Anwar Sadat by their Muslim ...”

“... demandingly, how it avoids invalidating itself. This shows up the advantage of the philosopher-king model, which can at least base its method of reaching political decisions on the philosophers’ claims to know best. Matters are made worse by the leaden style in which Between Facts and Norms is written. If poetry is what is lost in ...”

“... and ‘Time to make tea.’ Hogwarts is reached by a train that leaves from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross, visible only to people who know where to look for it. The ceiling in the school dining hall is a constantly changing lifelike simulation of the sky, and the portraits are alive: they visit one another and talk to the people outside the ...”

“... friends and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the Nazis, Corrie ten Boom, books by a disabled ...”

“... Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big Brother. But the allure of the old style ...”

“... age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... his conscience leads him to see himself as the 20th-century incarnation of Thebes’s incestuous king? No Olivier biographer, and certainly not Olivier himself, has ever mentioned in print the principal reason why books about this actor are written and sold in quantities that will never be rivalled by works on Gielgud, Richardson or Alec Guinness. The ...”

“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... expanded, until eventually Levy set up his own small record label, Magnet. One of his clients, Peter Shelley, wrote a song called ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’, and they advertised for someone to sing it. Then this happened: I had mixed feelings when a flamboyant, blond-haired 31-year-old knocked on our basement door a few days later and said he was our ...”

“... In the spring of 1958, my family moved from a rat-haunted tenement on King Street to one of the last remaining prefabs in Cowdenbeath. It was a move up, in most ways; the prefabs had been built as temporary wartime accommodation but, to my child’s mind at least, the cold and the damp, the putty-tainted pools of condensation on winter mornings and the airless heat of August afternoons were minor concerns compared with the pleasure of living on our own garden plot, in what was, essentially, a detached house, just yards from a stand of high beech trees where tawny owls hunted through the night, their to-and-fro cries so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, Margaret ...”

“... for her mother’s work, was born in 1957, a year after Brophy published her second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, an ‘autobiography or fake autobiography’ in which young Londoners take a road trip to Venice (it will appear from McNally Editions next year).Murdoch was supportive of Brophy’s books, which is more than you can say of Brophy, who ...”

“... father wears ‘a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple at the top’. In Henderson the Rain King, Henderson has a ‘helmet with its nipple at the top’. In Seize the day, Mr Rappaport’s ear cartilage is ‘twisted like a cabbage heart’, while in Humboldt’s Gift a Pole called Casey has ears that are ‘amazingly crinkled, like Chinese ...”