“... real Victorian moral tradition. Amis is certainly one of those creators of a fictional world – Evelyn Waugh and Powell himself being other cases – whose worlds are funny and compelling to read about but would, the reader can comfortably feel, be most disagreeable to have a part in. This simple reader/novelist contract seems no longer relevant ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You ...”

“... illustrations, Betjeman’s poem ‘How to Get on in Society’ and a contribution from Evelyn Waugh) brought home the fact that the identification with the narrator, always a one-way traffic, was in this case disguising the social distance travelled. Lancaster’s contribution to our knowledge of what grander scenes than those we have experience of ...”

“... her ghost. Almost all these stories have victims for whom the professional hearts of Jill Tweedie, Evelyn Home or Marjorie Proops would bleed: battered, deserted, betrayed, childless wives abound. But the narrative records suffering without sympathy and with a possible faint sarcasm – though the aftertaste is hard to identify. In one of the ...”

“... never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by ...”

“... Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ came out at much the same time as John Pocock’s The Diary of a London Schoolboy 1826-30, published by the Camden Society. John Pocock, 12¾, decisively a real person, was a builder’s son who lived on the edge of Kilburn, two miles out of London ...”

“... San Suu Kyi; it might have been more interesting to denounce any or all of these. The title echoes John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally admired: George Norris, who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The ...”

“... asks towards the end of the novel. ‘Nowadays it all feels like repetition.’ At this point in John Banville’s distinguished career it’s hard to ignore a sense that old ground is being worked over, again and again. It’s a safe bet that a new Banville novel will feature a male narrator, in late middle age, isolated, reliably unreliable, absorbed in ...”

“... The disillusionment of the war, and the brutal treatment of current specimens of the gentry by Evelyn Waugh and others, had sent their stock very low indeed. The Fountain was the ideal novel for the thoughtful middle class because it unexpectedly reinstated an ideal of gentlemanliness, going with tranquillity and inner confidence, which it portrayed ...”

“... How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped​ ,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a moment later: ‘It seems.’ Marlow, the narrator of the novel who is listening to Jim’s story, says: ‘Looks like it.’ This is one of many instances where Marlow’s language is drier and tougher than his thought, which is unwilling to condone Jim’s act but very sympathetic to the difficulty of living with the memory of it ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by ...”

“... years old. After happening on Spark’s novel in proof while working on his own Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh has decided to write it a glowing testimonial, which he publishes in the Spectator: ‘It so happens that The Comforters came to me just as I had finished a story on a similar theme, and I was struck by how much more ambitious Miss Spark’s essay ...”

“... fumbles with the carburettor. These people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time ...”

“... not-at-all-suppressed boredom and a cigarette holder. The boredom was partly a generational thing. Evelyn Waugh, b. 1903; Graham Greene, b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had ...”