“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ...”

“... Venetians rub shoulders with each other much more than we do and the city feels better for it.A nice carrier-bag from the Correr, red with yellow handles and on the front the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. There is a sticker inside saying ‘Used by permission of Corbis Corporation and Bill Gates’, to whom I suppose Leonardo, or his signature at ...”

“... the ‘our beautiful old silver’ school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West etc – they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first – and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... of church, five pubs, cottages, a green, a duck pond and a purling stream. It might be nice to think that the War Office picked these locations to provide the young recruits with fresh memories of the peaceful and bucolic country they’d be fighting for, but the nearby artillery ranges in both places were the more likely draw.At Aldbourne the ...”

“... for systematic differences behind the territorial separation. In his Revel, Riot and Rebellion, David Underdown has argued that two antagonistic rural cultures – quite close to popular images of Cavalier and Roundhead – existed in sheep-corn lowlands and wood-pasture uplands, based on distinct village and manorial patterns, and that it was these which ...”

“... once more’; and if I had thought of it I would have borrowed a line from my friend David Lodge, who borrowed it from George and Ira Gershwin: ‘Nice work if you can get ...”

“... in the second, was taken from 28 rue du Titien, Cannes, and from there to an assembly point in Nice, and from there to Drancy, and from there to Auschwitz on Convoy 61. The chronology: the master chronology is supplemented by the more limited chronologies that accompany individual pictures and by the interpolation of events pertaining especially to ...”

“... had any butter or bread. ‘Mince?’ asked Alf. ‘Yes,’ said the old lady. ‘Yes. Now, what nice boys you are.’ ‘And how about broccoli?’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Just enough for tomorrow. That’s great. Are you boys all right for rice?’ ‘Very much so,’ said Martin, sheltering from the rain. ‘We’ve got everything we need. Every last ...”

“... underside of the 1960s fixation on beautiful young people, the hangers-on and the left-behinds, as David Widgery once put it, ‘who hung on to the myths and … ended up in a mess’. It’s spooky the way Carter describes Honeybuzzard, with his ‘soft, squashy-nosed, full-lipped face’, his ‘new, very white, very frilly shirt’, and Ghislaine, with her ...”

“... feel, cannot be far from the Epiphany. And, in fact, for some decades now (from Walter Allen to David Lodge) critics have found it worth while to see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ in terms of the new movement of Modernism. Certainly it does no harm to recall that Kipling’s story was written nearly two decades before the so much more apparently modern Ulysses and The ...”

“... I heard some English people in a café asking the waiter why no one liked the English. They were nice people asking a genuine question, but often it’s the wrong people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists ...”

“... Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable ...”

“... to the US, that oil pipelines are good for the environment because caribou like to mate next to a nice warm pipe, and that the military should not admit gay men because they’d ‘sit around giving massages to each other’ and would be too relaxed to fight – is, as usual, irate: ‘If somebody knows they did not conspire with anybody from Russia to affect ...”

“... rise in the price of fuel could kill many of them off.’Before leaving I had rung a pig farmer, David Barker, whose farm is north of Stowmarket in Suffolk. Barker is 50 years old. His family has been farming pigs in Suffolk for four generations; they have lived and worked on the present farm since 1957. He owns 1250 acres and 110 sows, which he breeds and ...”