“... a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a book, not just a selection of the significant ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... will soon become so. Hill was very taken by the American editor who explained the description of King Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has ...”

“... use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British ...”

“... Murdoch novel (as she herself batted around Oxford, gown flying). There is a bicycle silhouette by Charles Mozley on the spine of the dust jacket for The Sandcastle. English schoolmasters, in the sad twilight, disappointed and damply lustful, trundle over gravel to reach ‘the smooth tarmac surface of the arterial road’. Wicker basket. Tweed jacket. Bicycle ...”

“... a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her husband, Charles Barnett Goodspeed, the trustee in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 ...”

“... know how … his fear of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian ...”

“... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... She wrote a letter of complaint to Robert Giroux, Lowell’s New York publisher, copying in Charles Monteith at Faber:I am deeply distressed that both of you would have seen this book through to publication without asking my permission for the prodigal use of my letters, for the use in the most intimate way of my name and that of my daughter … I know ...”

“... saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for economics education in universities. Partly as a result of their ...”

“... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...”

“... as is suggested by the above-cited cases of Mary Toft (1703-63, ‘the rabbit-breeder’) and Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903, ‘rural improver and gardener’). The ODNB’s greater inclusiveness is one of the ways it differs not just from its predecessor but also from Who’s Who, often regarded in the 20th century as the ante-chamber to the DNB. In that ...”

“... while those with reservations, including the Popular Front critic F.O. Matthiessen and the poet Charles Olson, preferred to align him with Shakespeare, his revolutionary Miltonic essence giving way to a more properly tragic register, with its evocations of madness and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to ...”