“... fear.’ ‘Why,’ said I to myself, ‘this explains all. The poor girl is beside herself.’ It may have been largely to placate these anxieties that Lister proposed a formal sanctification of the relationship. ‘It should be the same as a marriage & she would give me no cause to be jealous – made no objection to what I proposed, that is, her declaring ...”

“... make the best writers about war, and a novelist’s knowledge of the world he describes may have little bearing on the success of his novel. To write a work of club fiction, dependent as it is on successful translation from another art form, is therefore a far more ambitious project than it may at first appear; it ...”

“... evidence to link Benes to the assassination; and Benes himself later denied involvement. Yet on 15 May 1942, just before the assassination, Benes had observed that ‘an act of violence such as disturbances, direct subversion, sabotage or demonstrations, might be imperative or even necessary in our country. It would save the country internationally, and even a ...”

“... you were one. But you would have to forget in order to achieve the effect that Woolf describes. We may feel that Woolf’s preference for obliquity is too passive and too polite – in any event we have our writers, whether we want them or not – but the effect she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry ...”

“... uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the happy chance of a close relative being in charge of a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, had become acquainted ...”

“... over, and shows a label saying ‘Wouwerman’. Martin is undeterred and pedantic. The label may simply mean School of, Circle of, Follower of, Style of – ‘or nothing much at all’. ‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’ Tony asks. Martin has no doubts at all about this. ‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean.’ And ...”

“... hold. Hot blood is at the heart of Hill’s theological, oppositional poetics. Man’s passions may turn vicious, but without them he is unredeemable. Hence Hill’s admiration for righteous anger and blood sacrifice. Blood, in his poems, functions as a metonym for sincerity as much as savagery; and the image of fake blood (a ‘wound’ from a ‘red ...”

“... Littlewood have suggested that she should have had the credit for that renaissance. These matters may be, indeed usually are, overdetermined, but simpler explanations are handier, and in recent years Littlewood seems to have got left out of the story for ease of telling. In the end the value of these writers has to be considered apart from their effect on the ...”

“... Whispering Gallery, the first volume of his autobiography, he describes the planning stages: ‘I may even have toyed with the idea of starting a new international literature.’ Taking an ‘optimistic and Marxist view’, he found contributions from France, Spain, Russia and Poland, and New Writing seemed, in its beginnings, the authentic voice of violence ...”

“... surgeon grown rich from the silicone implant business, his mother a narcissistic hippy who may as a girl have danced with Jean-Paul Sartre but has been going downhill ever since, to end as her looks fade amid the fatuities of the New Age. Bruno has begun as a boy in cruel neglect; he can only, as a defeated, no longer erectile sensualist, end in ...”

“... to get a sustained spell of paid leave from the school, came to nothing. (However desperately he may have wanted to transform the circumstances of his life, one can’t help feeling that his wish not to do so was always marginally stronger.) He exhibited his pictures in various Polish cities without success. It says a great deal, however, for the ...”

“... in Werl and Wittlich; the Americans released the last of their war criminals from Landsberg in May 1958. Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach remained in Spandau, under joint four-power auspices, and a few individuals continued to be imprisoned by other nations. Herbert Kappler, the former police chief of Rome, briefly made headlines when he ...”

“... One afternoon in May 1995, I rang Ken Loach to try to persuade him to play Fantasy Filmmaking. In fact I had to call a number of British directors, and ask each one to imagine the kind of movie he or she would make given a bottomless budget. ‘An unlimited budget would be a liability,’ Loach said. ‘The more you spend, the more restricted you are because the more money you’ve got, the bigger the investment, the more nervous the investor and the more they dictate what the ending should be ...”

“... adamant that our own rights should be recognised but cannot accept that the interests of others may on some occasions have to take precedence. If we are victims, we find it difficult to acknowledge that those who stand accused are entitled to safeguards and if we find ourselves in the position of defendant we protest that our prosecution isn’t ...”

“... We should be even more cautious about an unwritten constitution, in which the meaning of a phrase may be more fluid because it lacks such a rigid context. It is futile to debate whether Victoria was more or less constitutional than George III, or whether Edward VII was the first really constitutional king, because no British monarch since 1688 has had power ...”