“... nor his enterprise. He has come a long way. As a juvenile his ‘ambition was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat ...”

“... surveyed by drones, or hard-hat visionaries in helicopters, from heights where even the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park looks great, is only there to be explained, improved, colonised and captured. So? So? So what?So when I think I’m moving across a city of memories, where I have lived and worked for fifty years, I find that, very soon, I lose the markers ...”

“... minding about the words. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, is uncomfortable to read because the smart striking words of her diary seem to give her no ease: she is outside even the other self it offers, and cannot have a love relation with its contents, the sort of relation which is so mysteriously paramount in everything about which Francis Kilvert ...”

“... placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself ...”

“... disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, co-author of Aickman’s first book, and to a reconsideration of the values of a certain kind of Englishness. ‘These people did what they wanted to do. They carried on when their work went out of fashion, when nobody was ...”

“... which included a sharp, affectionate recollection of his misfortunate father. He was ‘a little Smart Man-active to the last Degree in all Exercises-most patient of Fatigue and Disappointmts of wch it pleased God to give him full Measure’. Soldiers invariably get a good press in Sterne’s fiction, usually being shown as stoical and generous. Ross ...”

“... There is great comic potential in clothes. Woolf’s contemporary and acquaintance Edmée Elizabeth Dashwood wrote under the name of E.M. Delafield in the feminist magazine Time and Tide. From 1930 her column, ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’, was a popular feature, written in a persona set at a finely judged acute angle to her own life and ...”

“... aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ‘birds’. It signalled a relaxed, unbuttoned approach to things, life led with more ...”

“... liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third ...”

“... and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to entertain them with his impersonations. One evening Omai, the Tahitian tribal chief, comes to dinner (her brother James ...”

“... spend many anxious years trying to fill. The experience of death, which also took his sisters Elizabeth and Jane, was decisive for Thomas, and not healed by the simultaneous experience of having a cold mother. Elizabeth de Quincey was Evangelical, rather aloof, and able, in the manner of Evangelicals, to shield her ...”

“... much more arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way ...”

“... he was 78, Dennis Wheatley finally achieved his long-held ambition of being elected to a really smart gentlemen’s club, White’s. On entering the building, so he told a friend, his first objective was to consult the membership book to find out how many had supported his candidacy – a gratifying 35. ‘Not bad for the Streatham born son of a ...”

“... made working in Clinton’s West Wing sound thrilling, monstrous, deranged. A group of super-smart men (and one or two women) fought round the clock to pin down their super-smart, hopelessly promiscuous president (promiscuous with his time, his interests, his attention, rather than in the more obvious ways). Speeches ...”

“... seen the republication of some American women writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette ...”