“... to conjecture of this sort. In 1944, during a conversation very much designed to go on record, she said: ‘I think that actual life supplies a writer with characters much less than is thought ... People in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough.’ When ...”

“... I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the poet, said that on a trip to South Korea he had been approached by a Korean professor who asked him if it was true that ‘ck’ in the name ‘Cockburn’ was not pronounced. When James asked him why he was interested the professor explained that he was writing a book ...”

“... Theory and Practice. I won’t go into all that again, although there is plenty more that could be said. By someone else. My own role at the conference had little to do with debates about critical theory. I was there as a kind of relic from the past, as someone who used to edit ‘little magazines’. My function, it seemed, was to represent a marginalised ...”

“... highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not been there to ...”

“... slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to ...”

“... right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded ...”

“... be disappointed on opening the book, which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her ...”

“... think of anything to say,’ thus Karl Kraus in a famous aside in 1935. But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general. Only a very few other works come to ...”

“... Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to unseat Edward VIII (a good thing, as it happened, but none of his business) and was the architect of his newspaper’s appeasement-of-Hitler policy, his belief being that the Empire, in which he took an obsessive interest, was not at that stage fully behind ...”

“... the quality of his love. It was a quality that had changed with the passing of time. As Constable said, Rubens ‘delighted in phenomena; – rainbows upon a stormy sky, – bursts of sunshine, – moonlight, – meteors, – and impetuous torrents mingling their sound with wind and wave’. The words are like a description of Flood Landscape with Philemon ...”

“... as it puts in, and if you add the contribution to tourism it makes a good profit. Yet Lord Gowrie said that if people made tax-exempt charitable contributions to the arts under the 1986 Finance Act he would recoup the lost tax by reducing the Council grant. He preferred sponsorship, not mentioning that half the costs of sponsorship come from the public ...”

“... The Middle Years (6-9), and The Late Years (9 to 11). Its major episodes – the encounter with Edward Penn, aged seven, muralist; Edwin’s doomed love for the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the romantically tortured genesis of ...”

“... affect human appearance, behaviour and quality of mind; it was only in the temperate zones, he said, that ‘we find fertility and agile minds, an agreeable activity in external manners, and a delicate sensibility in pleasures.’ Two contributors turned to humoral theories. One maintained that ‘Negroes are of a very dry temperament’; the other ...”

“... boosted in their inimitable manner,’ Bigland wrote, ‘and when you have met such a man have said to yourself, “Well, where is his cleverness? I could beat him myself!”’ He resolved to do so.Metropolitan Police records released by the National Archives over the last decade enable us to fill in some of the details of the case. The police, it turns ...”

“... is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from.) What Tassie most has in common with her creator is a hyper-awareness of the way words ...”