“... supremacy where it belonged, with the ‘richer classes’. In an age which saw Ruskin calling John Stuart Mill a ‘loathsome cretin’ we needn’t be surprised that Harrison was also capable of strong language. When Joseph Chamberlain was said to have hurt his ankle in 1906, Harrison prayed ‘for the sake of our poor dear country’ that the trouble ...”

“... MacNeice, Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as ...”

“... man in the Commons, but argued that ‘so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.’ F.E. Smith, another unscrupulous chancer whom Mosley idolised, called him ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’. His voice initially had a high-pitched note, and after he took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing ...”

“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... her and hers.In an early story called ‘On the Day E.M. Forster Died’, the middle-aged Mrs Smith is released from the great man’s influence. Sitting in the London Library, as is her habit when her three small children are at school, she has the idea for something like the quartet. It is the book that will contain all of it: Suez, the naming of ...”

“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”

“... crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby and the bizarre tower of Charles Townsend’s Horniman Museum overlooking it ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... through until her speech had been triumphantly delivered. If is impossible to imagine a Kinnock, Smith or Major having the energy, determination and professional confidence to carry this sort of thing off. Similarly, she has now produced a book which, whatever its bias and dishonesties, is far, far beyond the normal politician’s memoirs in its thoroughness ...”

“... unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built. Expressionist ...”

“... shopkeepers in the Gard). In 1949, bored of Vassar’s rolled-up jeans, Bouvier applied for the Smith College Junior Year in Paris. It was a rigorous programme, taught entirely in French, starting in August at a crammer in Grenoble. At the beginning of October, a month before the second volume of The Second Sex came out, the group moved to Paris, where they ...”