“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... by his teeth ... He was also extraordinary in his garb, for he normally wore a jacket like a young college boy’s, never any gloves nor polish on his shoes – and yet among a thousand he would always have seemed the most finished of gentlemen. His voice was shrill – even strident, and nevertheless it was modulated by the drift of his thoughts with a ...”

“... was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous’. The novelist was in fact subject to long bouts of depressive illness, and ...”

“... for puritans? Mr Murphy’s subject index has an entry reading: ‘Sexual abstinence of Irish young people ... 528’. Alas, page 528 has not a word about this ...”

“... post office has become a food bank. The place is marked by tragedy and austerity. The owner, Mike (Edward Rowe), attempts a superstitious refurbishment: he removes the name plate with a crowbar. As he’s working the noise attracts two people, a drifter with a London accent (Callum Turner) and a bearded, sun-worn seaman, both of whom, like the boat, have ...”

“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... is mentioned just in passing for his ‘refined rhetorical studies’; Jameson, together with Edward Said, is attacked for holding that Derrida’s method leads to the avoidance of historical issues; Foucault is prised apart from Derrida despite the efforts of Frank Lentricchia to assimilate them to one another in their ‘understanding of history’. In ...”

“... advice, says Fleming, at any time. Autopsies had yielded some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering ...”

“... knew their limitations. After being absorbed into the art-world mainstream, under the patronage of Edward Steichen, he began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich ...”

“... of that other world?’ Perhaps every person here, ‘man or woman, it doesn’t matter, old or young’, has already committed suicide. For nearly two decades, Grossman has been turning over in his mind the possibility that Israel, miraculous nation as it likes to see itself, might in fact be a moribund state. ‘In order to maintain culture, and ...”

“... and which represents a smaller but no less striking solution to the same challenge. Pippa, a young silk-mill worker, begins the poem springing out of bed with her annual day’s leave before her: ‘How must I spend my Day?’ She decides to pick a path through her town that will bring her close to a number of locals whose various happy situations she ...”

“... of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.) But what the novel takes for granted is the young hero’s military status. Ernie didn’t. Every other letter through the latter half of 1917 into 1918 is filled with hopes of a secondment, but the truth is he missed most of the war and made a great deal of the skirmish that cut his legs. (No bones were ...”

“... new team have forced the departure of one of its political columnists, the deputy-editor, Hugo Young – a writer any newspaper might be glad to employ. As to what is happening at the Times – well, reading tastes differ: but who could ever have imagined that the Thunderer would seek to entice readers by conducting an up-market bingo game which is ...”

“... best left to newspapers: the role of the radio news bulletin was to encourage people to buy them. Edward Stourton recounts that one broadcast began: ‘Good evening, today is Good Friday. There is no news.’ By the mid-1930s, however, the BBC had set up a small news department as part of its burgeoning bureaucracy. It employed no reporters – news items ...”

“... College in the same year, Lewis was soon enjoying meetings of the Wee Teas, a dining club of young academics who liked talking philosophy. Next there was the Martlets, a literary society whose members read their stories to one another. Tolkien and Lewis finally met in 1926 and duly formed a club called the Cave for members of the Oxford English School ...”