“... a single day, we are told, their West German office gave away 750,000 copies of romantic novels to East German women. These escapers, it was assumed, now needed all the escapism they could get. In the benighted East their appetite for fantasy-fodder might – or might not – have been fed by titles like Daughter of the ...”

“... The author of King Solomon’s Mines and She composed his own epitaph, which was carved in black marble. It read: Here lie the Ashes of Henry Rider Haggard Knight Bachelor Knight of the British Empire Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country Nothing there about his ripping yarns, the first of which had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever Written ...”

“... sit up to eat a pear when it was absolutely à point? Hasn’t one heard that tale about someone else? Perhaps waiting up for pears was another of those fads of the Epoque. Like all affluent Edwardians, the Glyns were forever on the move. In Egypt the Sultan of Turkey, sensing a coolness between them, made Clayton a cash offer for his red-headed ...”

“... Wider still and wider grows the span of authors’ acknowledgements. My forbearing husband/wife, my secretary who corrected my spelling, my patient editor and Lord Weidenfeld Whose Idea it Was – these we have grown to expect and honour. Elizabeth Longford, now in her eighties, thanks two family doctors who ‘made life so secure for us’ (and who themselves survived to 90 and 86 ...”

“... of Liechtenstein’ (home of the Maxwell Foundation). Maxwell’s reply was: ‘Certainly. That is easy. There is no mystery.’ Of this, more later. In an earlier book, The Politics of Power, Haines wrote so candidly about his Downing Street years that Wilson is said to have called it ‘a dedicated hatchet job’. In his opening survey of the contradictions ...”

“... graciousness or praise, in which they resemble children along with their innocence in everything else.’ Fothergill and his staff were puzzled by a colonel who arrived with two beautiful girls and ordered expensive champagne. ‘Some suspected’ the girls, ‘others were certain, but I maintained that they were all right though I couldn’t place ...”

“... humour’ too. He was too near academe to be a cracker-barrel philosopher. His style was zestful, easy and lucid, free from tags and tired allusions. J.B. Priestley, who edited The Bodley Head Leacock (1957), claimed that, at his best, the Professor, by steering between the ‘amiable nonsense’ of English humour and the ‘hard-cutting wit and almost ...”

“... Mr Turner is my favourite Edwardian. He sits in a chair under the window. He doesn’t waste a lot of words. And when he laughs he rocks a little. The sky is busy and blue over Richmond. Every few minutes a plane goes by. They seem to enter the window-frame just about head height; each one passes through the ears of E ...”

“... later generations that there are always new readers for books about it. In Dear Old Blighty E.S. Turner is concerned with the home front, on which, he says, relatively little has been written. He makes it plain that the cynical view (as in the musical play Oh what a lovely war) that this was a generation ‘duped into the Forces by damsels singing patriotic ...”

“... from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he writes, ‘I began to wonder who the Tennants were. Should I be proud, worried or ashamed? What influence was this blood likely to have over my destiny?’ It sounds like another search for identity – ‘the curse of the age’, as E.S. ...”

“... Stein would say. With us, both the best and the worst writing seems unconscious that anything else is being written. Writing in America, on the other hand, is a joint pioneering venture, undertaken in a spirit, if not exactly of co-operation with other authors, then of mutual comment and criticism, malice or kindliness equally supportive. In the vast ...”