“... failure of the student to follow the argument. Some disagreement about what was actually said seems inevitable, and it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... them would cast a shade of illegitimacy over those secrets still locked away. And, as Sir Humphrey said, even knowing that there is a secret gives you some information about what it might be: you can infer something about the secret from the bits you are permitted to know. Secrets are never absolute; they’re never totally secure; and they’re never for ...”

“... importance – that thing must be its totality – its massings,’ the accumulations, it could be said, of the marvellous mess that results from the poem’s nine editions between 1855 and 1892. The result is a textual maze of additions, deletions, revisions and rearrangements. It can, he insists, be ‘comprehended at no time by its parts, at all time by its ...”

“... to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there.’ Indeed, the Conservatives could then perhaps ‘go back to being ...”

“... as historians call him nowadays. The others are Ed, which could mean ‘riches’ or be short for Edward; Til, which could mean ‘good’ or be short for a name like Tilwine; and Bera, which is hard to relate to any known Anglo-Saxon name but means ‘bear’ in Old English. Each of the four arm-rings has been ‘treated in a distinctive way, which ...”

“... Certainly it doesn’t figure largely in the fiction of James himself, of which it might be said, along with Gertrude Stein on the subject of her home town, Oakland, California: ‘There is no “There” there.’ The other topic snaking its way through these pages is war. Before rushing to judgment, one should recall that there was a time when war ...”

“... the most barefaced local restorers – Xacousti, Lambros and Rousopolis were names to remember, he said. Then the market broke: partly because forgeries had swamped it, but largely because Greek art of the last centuries before Christ was no longer regarded as the all-time absolute of beauty. Professor Bell remembered that in his youth Boeotian coroplasts were ...”

“... In Joe’s family in the interwar years, underwear was unheard of: no wonder the rich said that the working class stank. In almost every paragraph the authentic banalities of the British working class stumble through: for a childhood misdemeanour Joe and his pals ‘got a proper ticking-off’; in his household ‘literally every penny ...”

“... and charismatic figure expounded was the value of fables. Which kind of fable, Apollonius is said to have asked his companions, is the more philosophical: the kind found in the poets, or Aesop’s? His respondent, one Menippus, replied: the poetic kind, of course. There is no value in Aesop, just ‘frogs and donkeys and rubbish for old women and ...”

“... shoes. They were never able afterwards to identify which course it had been. Detailed to cover Edward VIII’s exit from the country after the Abdication, he attended a dance in Folkestone in white tie and tails, slipping off every now and again in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the Post to check whether the ex-king was leaving via the nearby Lympne ...”

“... it must have been cooking for the British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered ...”

“... The Horners of Mells commissioned from Munnings and Lutyens a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is given to the already over-exposed ...”

“... Lewis is steeped in Goldziher. The names of both Wellhausen and Goldziher were dropped in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), but neither is discussed in that eccentric, erratic and substantially misleading book. Instead, Said preferred to concentrate on writers like Sir Richard Burton, Lord ...”

“... his Polish mistress Madame Hanska. Custine married in 1821, but began a lifelong relationship with Edward de Sainte-Barbe shortly afterwards. His sexuality had long been public knowledge, but in 1824, after arranging a tryst with a soldier in Epinay, he was set upon by several cavalry officers. He seems to have seen the incident – and the attendant publicity ...”