“... 1905: Philip, who is still with us, in 1915. The portraitist says, rather oddly, that he cannot be said to have known his brother until he was about seven and his subject 17; as they were both living in the same house, with stable parents, he must mean that such knowledge could begin only with the age of reason. From then on, ‘the only prolonged period of ...”

“... to knock Middlesbrough. Still, they wanted to know what I thought: ‘You can be honest,’ they said. Or some of them said. My B&B was a Victorian villa whose front garden was tended and walled. To get into town each day I walked down the Linthorpe Road: it’s the arterial road, where fights happen on a Saturday night. I ...”

“... and in at the back door of the West End Central Police Station. ‘I there arrested him, and he said, “I thought we were going to your place,” and that was true!’Butcher’s colleague PC Darlington offers more detail about the atmosphere in the toilets, the ‘deathly quiet’, no one urinating, ‘practically everyone you see will be masturbating ...”

“... write novels, do the Post Office, and go out three days.’ ‘In some coming perfect world,’ he said on another occasion, ‘there will be hunting 12 months in the year.’ An acquaintance once said in praise of Browning that he ‘wasn’t at all like a damned literary man’. Neither was Trollope. His collected letters ...”

“... we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is more still to be said, but one of the merits of this book is that the writer clearly points the way to anyone who may feel like such an undertaking. One of the reasons Bridges has been neglected is probably the prevalent though quite inaccurate idea that his life was serene and ...”

“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ...”

“... labyrinthine plot – ‘If you come in five minutes after this picture begins,’ the trailer said, ‘you won’t know what it’s all about’ – produced more meaning than it ever intended, or could hope to contain. The plot at its simplest: Sergeant Raymond Shaw (played by Harvey) is a Korean War veteran, winner of a Medal of Honor, who, along with ...”

“... Mangan’s temperament than in his poems and essays: Mangan’s ‘purely defensive reserve’, he said, ‘is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man ...”

“... into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 ...”

“... Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was struck, and Auden himself realised that he had not lost his looks so much as become photogenic in a new and unexpected ...”

“... in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy. It threw up waverers, compromisers, ready phrases and flashing ...”

“... Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun can hardly be dismissed as unimportant, but it must be said that little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has ...”

“... in extenuation it might be pleaded that the theme was friendship, not unfriendliness. It should be said straight away that the selection of poems in Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house (to use a ludicrous outdated trope); there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are ...”

“... of Past and Present – his ‘Tract for the Times’, though ‘not in the Pusey vein’, as he said – with its eloquent attacks on aristocratic partridge-shooting and Parliamentary do-nothingism and its sympathetic exposure of the wretchedness of the urban poor, Carlyle visited Liverpool. He described conditions in Formby in a (hitherto ...”

“... Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony’. The Lord Mayor’s parting shot is one of my favourite quotations, for as well as being banal, ridiculous, righteously angry and ...”