“... the British public – notwithstanding the myths propagated by party zealots – seems to have had little difficulty with pragmatic Labour, Tory and Liberal politicians working together towards a common purpose. The laity has largely been spared subsequent opportunities to endorse cross-party co-operation. The pejorative associations of the term ...”

“... that work formulated a full response to the work of her heroes – Picasso, Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arthur Rackham, Gustave Doré. The work most indicative of things to come is a painting for which she received a prize at the Slade, Under Milk Wood (1954), which transposes to a Portuguese kitchen Dylan Thomas’s (then new) radio play. Creatures dead and ...”

“... Commons met for the first time in the Chapter House.)It seems wrong that these monuments are so little regarded. They make the abbey the most vivid and uncompromising encounter with Britain’s old power elites in the full glory of their Ozymandias-like hubris (Shelley, incidentally, only got a measly Poets’ Corner stone tablet, alongside Keats, in ...”

“... sunshine and bohemia and ‘probably an unconscious desire to get away from Chicago’.Her father, Arthur Cohen, a political activist and labour organiser, died when she was thirteen. He casts a long shadow over her work and is given the last word in The Flowering, the latest addition to her autobiography. She describes the ‘near constant political ...”

“... Some authorities insist on regarding her as a great philosopher’s rather tiresome consort: Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the lively Modern Masters essay on Sartre, is at pains to endorse Beauvoir’s own view that she wasn’t her partner’s intellectual equal. Sartre, he writes, ‘appears to have been spectacularly unfaithful’, and Beauvoir was ‘a ...”

“... its victory more warmly welcomed than at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Yet today things look a little different. Despite more than six years’ declared commitment to monetary discipline (even longer if we include the half-hearted efforts of Denis Healey), the UK inflation rate remains stubbornly above that which the Government wishes to see. Meanwhile ...”

“... in 1914 with the International Brigaders, MacDiarmid writes: Despite the undeniable honesty, the little literary gift, What is Sherston’s Progress but an exposure Of the eternal Englishman Incapable of rising above himself, And traditional values winning out Over an attempted independence of mind. MacDiarmid is both right and wrong. Sherston’s Progress ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... of a sex-maniac’. The 18-year-old heroine, Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, is a little in love with all the members of the family who come to live next door, and madly in love with one of them, Roddy. The first part of the book is a long retrospective, the story of Judith’s first meeting with the Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who volunteered for service in the British Army even after the Easter Rising in 1916) occur only at the ...”

“... it was Tom, who had not a tithe of the intellectual power of his brother Matthew, or of Arthur Clough, who alone gained Firsts in Mods and Greats. His friends and relatives despaired of his habit of ruining his worldly chances by a constitutional impulsiveness of character, beginning with his decision to emigrate to New Zealand at the age of 24 when ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... far worse than to be thought of as no good. Not that he lacked literary vanity. He monitored the little magazines as fiercely as he checked out the mass-market press. And he was forever getting into literary quarrels, taking offence, taking revenge. He fought with the exiting Georgians; he fought with the incoming highbrow avant-garde. Osbert wanted – and ...”

“... a 19th-century cowboy paraphrasing Swift (‘They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance’); eerier still to see a distorted after-image of King Lear set loose in a Western desert, ‘like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die’. In another cultural ...”