“... him.’ Such casual racism was common at the time, as was antisemitism. In 1930, Nicolson was at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s house when the Foreign Office nomination board was discussed, and ‘the awkward question of the Jews arises … Jews are far more interested in international life than are Englishmen and if we opened the service it might be flooded ...”

“... Carpenter, ‘only Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy could relate an occasion when Britten overstepped the mark’:He was in a towel following a bath at Crag House, when ‘Ben came up with an extremely soppy, sentimental look on his face, and put his arms round me, and kissed me on the top of the head. And I made the speech which I’d long prepared. I ...”

“... published all his early volumes of poetry was a sign of his good connections, and the fact that Leonard Woolf arranged for the release of a limited, more luxurious edition of 100 copies of The Magnetic Mountain, signed by the author, indicates one of the ways in which political idealism and commercial shrewdness could promote each other in the publishing ...”

“... from the Scottish literary community for heresy. His book begins by quoting a letter the poet Tom Leonard wrote to an ‘inquiring editor’: ‘The one area I couldn’t touch would be contemporary Scottish writers, or the recent past. The place is too small, and I like to relax when I go for a walk.’Hames is challenging the belief that the affirmation of ...”

“... gifts of oranges for Holly from the Mays down in Jacksonville, and packages from Ceylon sent by Leonard van Geyzel, a gentleman planter whom Stevens had asked months earlier to gather local artefacts which only Ceylon could offer’, in Mariani’s culpably unexcited account. But this was precisely what excited Stevens; it was in fact what he lived for. In ...”

“... from the current stars of hardboiled lite, the Florida ecologist Carl Hiaasen and grizzled Elmore Leonard (as cannibalised by Quentin Tarantino), but also from Mosley. The Griffin books won’t reduce to exploitable Hollywood storylines, they’re much too rich and strange for that. Villains don’t have to be land-grabbing corporate monsters or tourists with ...”

“... guitar from the school music cupboard – because he was the bass player – and my other friend Mark and I had old nylon-string classical guitars from jumble sales or somewhere, and we must have known at least three chords between us, and we were assuming that pretty soon we’d be on the Peel Show and then before we knew it there’d be a call and we’d ...”

“... the headline Man with Friend with Cancer ‘Going through a rough Time’: Three months ago, Mark Sennis received the news that everyone dreads: Ben Murphy, a friend and coworker with whom he ‘occasionally went out to lunch’, had been diagnosed with cancer. ‘You never think you’re going to be the one,’ Sennis said. ‘At first, I remember ...”

“... late 1970s, sung at the very end. Indeed, the programme had become sacrosanct: in September 1990 Mark Elder was abruptly replaced as the conductor because he had questioned the playing of such patriotic music when the Gulf War was about to be waged, at a time when ‘the public would be better disposed than ever to bellow their way through “Land of Hope ...”

“... of his semen … appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns.’ If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit ...”

“... Macdonald about the passionless ease of the old New Yorker: ‘Its editors would have considered Mark Twain too crude and Heine too highbrow for their purposes … Its inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle. It can be read aloud in mixed company without calling a blush to the cheek of the most virtuous banker.’Some of the new magazine’s ...”

“... the fire he felt. Of all the smelts I ever smelt, I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck ...”

“... to reach Glasgow directly. Port Glasgow found its future as a shipbuilding town, making its mark in industrial history and the pantheon of Scottish innovation by launching Europe’s first commercial steamship, the Comet, in 1812. Migrant workers arrived from the Highlands and the rural Lowlands, and especially from the place Victorian writers nicely ...”

“... his buildings in Baltimore after white tenants moved out and African Americans moved in.*To mark the 400th anniversary this year of the arrival of the first slaves in the US, Obama had arranged for a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, to replace Andrew Jackson, the slave owner known as the Indian Killer, on the $20 ...”

“... a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward representation of causality, desiring to alter the emphasis, to light scenes in a way that could not be achieved with ordinary ideas of chronological order and point of view and cause and effect. Forster says ...”