“... of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent. If a bright young director survives this malarkey and makes a second great hit, in Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart ...”

“... of England that they arrived with were sadly wide of the mark; curious distillations in which David Niven-like aristocrats dispensed fairness and tolerance in a Dickensian landscape. ‘All I knew about England was what I read,’ says Teddy Peiro, who was born in Argentina: ‘I was very fond of the famous detective, Derek Lawson, and his ...”

“... clergyman’s wife,’ Quaife tells us, quoting one of his court cases, ‘saw the young man try to put his hand up her daughter’s dress as they sat at table,’ and there was recrimination. The young man boasted: ‘I’ll fuck thee and thy daughter before I go home… I have fucked ten old women of this ...”

“... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...”

“... 12 rounds with the black limousines, trying to cross the road, so I was happy to encounter the young models willing to show me inside. The gargoyle count at Paris fashion events is always high and that is part of the entertainment. Before I’d even found my seat, I’d spotted Stella McCartney in a blue net veil talking to Suzy Menkes, Claudia Schiffer ...”

“... Exchequer, and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade – and, down on the Bristol waterfront, a young carter called Ernest Bevin was getting himself elected chairman of a newly established carmen’s branch of the Dockers’ Union? The question gains added point when joined to the now fashionable question whether the current political dominance of Margaret ...”

“... the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its ...”

“... Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) may have been as pardonable as it was pathetic, given the Strindbergean state of his marriage. But the unguarded remark he made to his only daughter Jill is a ...”

“... which seem to cancel themselves out – not prose and not a poem. John Ashbery has called this young Californian ‘a stunning new voice in American poetry’. It is difficult to agree. Clary spills mild thoughts in hazy paragraphs. Terrified of the literal, she speaks with a confident evasiveness. The result is strange, puffy gossip. There is no way to ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... it might as accurately have been captioned ‘Your Country Needs ME.’ From the moment when, as a young captain doing survey work on Cyprus in 1883, he managed to secure a timely transfer to Egypt by arranging for two telegrams to be sent asking for his release, so that he could safely decline the first, thus gaining credit for what Trevor Royle calls his ...”

“... one point co-founding the Harvill Press. Flora’s husband, a Boys Own Paper sort of chap crippled young by a kick from his horse, was obliquely immortalised by W.H. Auden: Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by ...”

“... Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson 21 were convicted on corruption charges. There were ...”

“... beaten up by disorderly revellers at Halloween. Many, too, will sympathise with the group of young people on their way home from Catechism at Westbury on Severn in 1610, who fell to ‘dancing and quaffing’, and deriding the doctrine of their minister. This incident gave rise to some fifty prosecutions, for drunkenness, fornication, bearing bastards ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”