“... you whole again, a claim that Stephen must have seemed to epitomise as he strode back into Trinity Hall with a fresh Alp in his pocket; and Meredith would have warmly agreed. The climactic episode in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a walk through the woods, a breezy aesthetic experience which marks the hero’s moral regeneration. (You are reminded of Irving ...”

“... Grover Cleveland. Her parents were married in Westminster Abbey and she grew up in Kirkleatham Old Hall near Middlesbrough, a house with sixteen bedrooms. In her social class, girls were simply not educated; Foot spent a lot of time riding, and was taught chiefly at home by governesses who, she said, ‘didn’t know anything’. But she determined to escape ...”

“... Boulez is no doubt keenly aware. Among Boulez’s contemporaries, Stockhausen, Elliott Carter and John Cage are notably eloquent and prolific commentators on themselves. Boulez’s writing covers a considerable range: he is not just a theorist like Messiaen in Technique of My Musical Language or Hindemith in The Craft of Musical Composition, but also on ...”

“... appreciated.He did not think much of the Irish. ‘Apart from the fact,’ he wrote to his friend John Hayward, ‘that the Irish have a certain respect for poetry and religion, theirs is a tiring society; and the kind of war nerves they are suffering from – not really daring to make up their minds what they think, and not being really prepared for anything ...”

“... or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’? You don’t have a slave to guard your door, as the ancients did, so you set the alarm (or you set the dog, cave canem). Keys? Yes, they’re in your hand. You have ‘the power of the ...”

“... it is, I don’t see it forming one of the Saturday night film shows they have in our village hall.19 March, Yorkshire. A gorgeous morning, the snow all but gone and though it’s windy still almost warm. Between Rupert getting up and him fetching me a cup of tea I reread ‘Elizabeth at Rycote’, an essay in A.L. Rowse’s The English Spirit, published ...”

“... Horden colliery closed in 1986, though the union committee meets every Wednesday in the Miners’ Hall to process death benefit and compensation claims. The Big Club, Horden’s ‘legendary workingmen’s club’, turns out to be virtually shut up, save for a doorman levying a toll of tenpence a time to deter non-existent visitors, and a dwindling band of ...”

“... to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ...”

“... her 1967 picture of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, New Jersey, in a Knights of Columbus Hall. The twins’ father thought that it was ‘the worst likeness of the girls we’d ever seen’, but that was hardly the point. The girls are standing, posing, right beside each other. They are wearing the same clothes. And they are looking at the ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... done to their mother too. Their only real protection was the mythic and tequila-breathing Uncle John, who always knew what to say, crying out ‘this situation calls for enchiladas’ whenever things really disintegrated. He had a better handle on such situations than the Catholic Church. In a story called ‘Silence’, he snatches up Mamie’s Bible and ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. This is a God’s-eye view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”