“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... deplored by Swift’) and the Indigenous peoples described in travellers’ tales. Another critic, Michael Wilding, has noted their ‘markedly African features’. What is Swift trying to do by depicting a sub-class with features similar to those of marginalised groups? Is it enough to say, as Grant does, that ‘the only saving grace of this ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... away. Don’t try to get involved too closely. Otherwise you’ll get your fingers burnt.’ Ann Wood recalls: ‘you really needed just a little bit to be apart, or you really did risk annihilation.’ Rosemond Strode, Britten’s last amanuensis, speaks of Aldeburgh as a ‘flypaper’. The mental cruelties that Britten inflicted on people cannot be ...”

“... his tutors telling him that the man in the street, a naive realist, ‘never/Can see the wood for the trees’. ‘I never thought,’ MacNeice reflected, ‘that I should/Be telling them vice-versa/ That they can’t see the trees for the wood.’ MacNeice, who spoke so witheringly of what he called ...”

“... useful iron and steel objects were melted down into useless pig iron, or dying to save a log of wood.’ He now sees instead the sinister side of the old ‘folk religion’, ‘like an underground river of fire, coming to the surface ... when social and political structures are ... cracking’. Its essence, he says, is ‘a terrible vision of the present ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”

“... even at the Last Judgment, when they have dragged their bodies back from earth to the sorrowful wood, they will not, because of their sin, be allowed to reassume them. The bodies will merely be hung on their branches: ‘ciascuno al prun dell’ombra sua molesta’ (each on the thorn of its own molesting shade). The extra emblematic meaning of this line is ...”

“... regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I’d be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot.30 March. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... Yet it is only the two and a half years from July 1914 to Asquith’s fall in December 1916 that Michael and Eleanor Brock have chosen to publish. Even within this period, they tell us, they have excluded most of her musings on her family, as well as lists of many of the guests she entertained so frenetically. On the other hand, the book is plumped out by ...”

“... the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... happens, the changes on the surface only served to emphasise what was already there. James Wood coined the term ‘hysterical realism’ to describe her first novel, White Teeth, but it only really applied to what was most on display – the foisonning, punning, teasing, literary surface. The surface changed for each of Smith’s novels, but the ...”

“... an earlier generation, since overtaken by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in ...”