“... and obscurity – are reflected in the novel’s epigraphs, a pair of quotations from Mark E. Smith, the Fall frontman. One is about his urge as a teenager to ‘make music that didn’t exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory’; the other is Dadaist or daft: ‘Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about ...”

“... Dean Inge, H.G. Wells and Co now seem dead, only enlivened – as in his marvellous ‘Chuck it, Smith’ verses addressed to F.E. Smith on the subject of Welsh Disestablishment – where the wit is so airy that he has absorbed the matter in question into his own fantasy life. One feels this when reading an essay, which ...”

“... the local church ‘with rather deceitful blue eyes’ (‘he makes eyes at Barbara Tox and Gwen Smith now’), and ‘Ronald’, ‘quite a common sort of youth, but rather good-looking’, and ‘another romance where I never said a word’. Next she lists her ‘cracks’, or crushes, at school, no longer conjuring the world of the silent screen but of ...”

“... them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline or a ...”

“... who feel themselves to be continuous over long stretches of time – they include St Augustine and Graham Greene. The difference also works at the level of entire cultures. The question of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the ...”

“... has something in common with the real thing as it would be written by Bishop or Plath or Stevie Smith. It is aware, too, of its own comic potentiality. So was a phrase she liked using at this time about ‘kissing the dead lips of Emily Brontë’. Unlike Barker, Elizabeth always expressed herself with the clarity of the true egotist. As recorded in By ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... them: everything radiates out from the city. ‘I came in the 1980s as a student,’ Dave Smith, the head of Stepping Stone, which is based in Rochdale, told me. ‘Manchester city centre was a desert. You really wouldn’t go for a night out there unless you were going to the Hacienda or one of them clubs. You’d stay in your locality. Now they ...”

“... Small wonder. The novelist who finishes his book is a different person from the one who began it, Graham Greene says: but he was thinking of a normal time-span of a year or so, not twenty. If Benengeli’s initial raison d’être was to be a parody of every chivalric ghost-writer that had ever necromantically recorded a wandering knight’s career, his ...”

“... years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped ...”

“... voice always childlike in its directness. In her lifetime this prompted comparisons with Stevie Smith, which Comyns did not care for, and indeed she had little in common with Smith, the suburban celibate whose authorial self is firmly if oddly poised, while Comyns’s always seems at the mercy of events. For the reader of ...”

“... up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in ...”

“... held it back for three or four years) encouraged a spate of ‘grimly honest’ realist dramas. As Graham Greene remarked of one of them, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. A.J. Cronin, the best-selling novelist whose ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of ...”

“... French, fence and ride: the skills of a courtier. On his return, he found a mentor in Sir James Graham, a gentleman of the privy chamber (and a former favourite himself). While away from court on progress, James stopped at Apethorpe in Northamptonshire. Buckingham, then 21, was also there. This was no coincidence. Buckingham was smooth-faced and perfect ...”