“... of language in speech or writing. Like Chomsky, Saussure wanted to get away from what he took to be the superficiality of mere databanks of linguistic facts: instead he wished to fix the rules, valid for all languages everywhere, without which there could be no language. His structuralism is psychological, as Chomsky’s is, and oppositional, or ...”

“... of one of his neglected patients sets off to the cemetery’. Unfair, because Rae suggests that he took more trouble than might have been expected over his patients, but Beerbohm had put his pencil on the interesting fact that Grace had done a great deal better in money terms as an ‘amateur’ cricketer than he could have hoped to do as a medical man, and a ...”

“... answer to an enigmatic question might well determine the rest of your life. Born in 1933, Storey took the exam in 1944, the year in which the Butler Education Act came into force. He was one of the saved and made it to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield. The problems of the grammar-school boy like Storey were anatomised by Richard Hoggart in the ...”

“... last. He was devoted to an adoring and possessive mother; but his adoration, unlike Lawrence’s, took the sensible line of keeping away from her as much as possible, although he wrote to ‘Bessie’ assiduously every day. He saw the humour as much as the pathos in unequal relationships: young as he is, Leo is aware of his adored Marion as a comic as well as ...”

“... though the Dervish forces were massacred.) Such imperial dramas – the Zulus supplied another – took hold of the public imagination back home, supplying stirring preludes to the great anti-climax of the Boer War at the century’s end. Memories and legends were still potent when A.E.W. Mason wrote The Four Feathers, made into one of the first Korda colour ...”

“... between blocks. I ask a group of boys playing football whether they can show me where the murder took place. Their spokesman is courteous and takes time to point out where I can find Hordle Promenade. When I ask him to clarify his directions he does so and then goes back to his game. It is now just before four o’clock. I stop and speak briefly to several ...”

“... how much detail their story is told in. Peter was Doris’s third child, the one who in 1949 she took with her, when he was two, to London from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) along with her first finished manuscript, The Grass Is Singing. The two packages are always mentioned together. The manuscript was in the suitcase she carried, they say. The child is ...”

“... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... the reverend submitted insurance claims on his nephew to the Beneficial National, the Vulcan, the John Hancock and the World Wide insurance companies. The reverend, who was black, was assisted in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in ...”

“... from New Deal enthusiasts for a democratic people’s culture to the Communist Party, which took jazz to its bosom from 1935 on. (The trotskisant intellectuals of New York appear to have shown no interest in the music, though its greatest champion once signed a letter of protest in New Masses with Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro and the Trillings, whom it ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... thinking that something really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we took shelter in a little café-cum-shop somewhere in North Wales and all the other customers were talking in a language I couldn’t understand. Although quite gratified in retrospect by this evidence of authentically local culture, my parents were clearly made ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... Straying Student’, to a knottier and more derisive manifestation of the same drive (though it took him 17 years to get together a volume of poetry in the new mode – Ancient Lights came out in 1955, while 1938 was the date of its predecessor Night and Morning). Social criticism: this is one of the two major preoccupations of Irish writers in the 20th ...”