“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have not come here for philanthropic reasons,’ she said, or to ‘show that there are nice Jews who help Arabs. I came to struggle against the Israeli occupation.’ Working closely with Nawal Staiti and Samira Zubeidi, both of them married to Fatah militants who were in and out of prison, Arna established an alternative education system called ...”

“... to look, and the young woman grabbed his laptop: she was an FBI agent. So were the street people. Nice one, the Feds. Ulbricht was logged into Silk Road under the account ‘/Mastermind’. Game over for Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht went on trial in 2015, was convicted, and is serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole. There are several ...”

“... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”

“... the flat where he lived affected his breathing.Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of ...”

“... The Norwegians refused the EC tout court; the Danes declined Maastricht; the Irish, the Treaty of Nice; the Swedes, the euro. Each time, the political class promptly sent them back to the polls to correct their mistake, or waited for the occasion to reverse the verdict. The operative maxim of the EU has become Brecht’s dictum: in case of setback, the ...”

“... He showed her the damage in the restaurant.‘What a mess!’ she exclaimed. ‘This is such a nice, up-and-coming area too.’The real issue, the man told her, wasn’t the mess but the cost of recharging the sprinkler system, around $6000. The sum surprised her, and on the basis of it – still with the same amused, motherly air – she amended the ...”