“... chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware of always being obliged to say the unsayable, but the pose ...”

“... had largely to depend on conversations with Ivy’s two surviving sisters, old ladies who for long had scarcely met their celebrated relative from one year’s end to the other, but who had some acquaintance with the books and were perhaps not unnaturally prone to hear in them echoes from a distant past. For the present volume the situation has been ...”

“... year saw the publication of the first of six volumes of his letters, also immaculately edited by Pamela Clemit. The volume starts in 1778, when Godwin took up his first post as a dissenting minister, through the publication of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793 and The Adventures of Caleb Williams the following year, and ends shortly after the ...”

“... as the office pub for the staffs of both newspapers. Shaped rather like a railway carriage (i.e. long and narrow), it had a small spit-and-sawdust bar at the front, where genuine inky printers sank pints of bitter. Only one journalist was allowed into this bar, along with his guests. He was Mr Arthur Christiansen, the legendary editor of the Daily ...”

“... the brilliant but undeniably odd writer, X. Trapnel. The speed with which the voracious ice-queen, Pamela Widmerpool, bolts from her husband to live in penury with Trapnel is a tribute to his late friend’s remarkable effect on women; Maclaren-Ross may have lacked funds, but he was never short of adoring women. ‘People think because a novel’s invented, it ...”

“... the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the ...”

“... Mexico.’ The stake-out that forms the climax of Dog Soldiers recognisably draws on the six-week-long Pranksters/Hells Angels ‘Trips Festival’ that is one of the set-pieces of Wolfe’s book, relocated by Stone from La Honda, California, to a border-village in Mexico; similarly, the character of Dieter in Dog Soldiers is in part based on the Kesey of ...”

“... in the non-imperial sense) who were called the Cruthin and who existed in Ulster long before the 17th-century settlement. He also emphasises his Ulsterness by having a photograph of the statue of Cuchulain in the GPO above his desk. Cuchulain is an authentically Ulster hero in a way that Carson – a Dubliner who privately despised the ...”

“... time for having a conversation’.) Senior acknowledges that more affordable childcare would go a long way to alleviating pressure on working parents but doesn’t press the point with much vigour. Her focus instead is on what parents themselves can do to improve their lot. Her first recommendation is that mothers and fathers – particularly mothers ...”

“... The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting obedient attention from each new generation of students, but this form of academic perpetuity does not extend to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour ...”

“... life are of much more importance to recent British history than liberal empiricism has allowed. Pamela Horn’s study is thorough, sensible social history by a scholar who has delved into a vast range of primary sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend while ...”

“... uncomfortable is its unusual length: the spare narrative of mutual deception is fleshed out with long appeals from the woman to be allowed off the tower, and long speeches in return by the scholar. And as these conversational exchanges add flesh to the skeleton of the tale, so the literal flesh of the lady is scorching ...”

“... gaze, leer or stare. ‘I did not want to be judged by my body, my beauty, or the lack thereof,’ Pamela Taylor, who wears the hijab, explains, ‘but as an individual, for my personality, my character and my accomplishments.’ Many Saudi women, Maliha Masood writes, are aware that the veil denies ‘men their usual privilege of discerning whomever they ...”

“... provincial gentility. Private pleasure gardens attached to noble houses and royal courts have a long history, but Vauxhall Gardens, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames in 1661, might well have been the first commercial pleasure garden in Europe. The business flourished for two centuries, finally closing in 1859. Vauxhall’s special status, Alan ...”

“... deeds. The one precluded the other: he held government office for a relatively short time over a long political career, largely because of what he said, or the way he said it. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 ended his front-bench career and remains a focus of scrutiny. It was the speech at once of a politician on the stump and a classicist on the ...”