“... miscarriage on him. Many years later, Fortune told me that Mead had eventually rounded on him and said he was such an aggressive man that he should go off to study warfare in another tribe. He obliged, and then one day a runner came with a letter from Mead announcing that she was going off with Bateson. ‘What would you have done?’ he asked me. I shook my ...”

“... camera? Isherwood for his part was never sure. ‘I have no idea what I’m like totally,’ he said in 1973, by which point he had known himself for 69 years. ‘I mean, I have no sense of myself as a person exactly, just as a lot of reactions to things.’ Mirrors feature strongly in Isherwood. Aged 34, Isherwood anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold ...”

“... patched and pieced and retold and revoiced the material. During the Soviet era, as Ugrešić has said, the use of traditional material gave writers freedom because it appeared to conform to the populist and nationalist policies of the state. (Lenin had claimed that folktales could be used as the basis for ‘beautiful studies about the hopes and longings of ...”

“... in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of ...”

“... Among​ the poems Edward Thomas drafted in 1916, shortly before he was posted to France, was ‘As the team’s head-brass’. The poet, seated in the boughs of a fallen elm, watches a ploughman at work ‘narrowing a yellow square/Of charlock’. He exchanges words with him as he pauses at the turn of each furrow, so that the conversational back and forth maps at intervals onto the changing geometry of the field ...”

“... have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for the ‘authorised’ biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly ...”

“... in charge. ‘We are not going to hurt anybody,’ Father Michael Dougherty of Lansing, Michigan said. ‘We just want access to this place’ – he pointed north – ‘to Jerusalem.’ From the checkpoint, Jerusalem was a ten-minute drive. A young American marcher urged the soldiers: ‘Come, join us in Jerusalem.’ The older soldier ordered the ...”

“... I really ought to have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig ...”

“... a kind of animal innocence, not knowing their own cruelty. An Awfully Big Adventure could be said to relate to both genres. It is remarkable, however, in suggesting some of these mechanisms without making disturbed adolescent girls seem a different species. The production which the events of the story bring to an end is of Peter Pan. In it Stella ...”

“... the adjacent ocean. Those born in a country of such intense heat are mostly black in colour. It is said that they are no different in human nature, being kindly and compassionate.’ This would be an unusually enlightened opinion even today in one of the most racially conscious countries in the world. The public curiosity for foreign exotica, new gadgets and ...”

“... Beaton and his family early in the 19th century. They had rowed in a dory from Prince Edward Island with all their belongings: And they slept under the boat, turned the dory over and slept under it. And when they woke in the morning, there was a little rivulet on the beach, and they started a fire, just underneath the high tall trees, so she ...”

“... Amnesty and the BBC, without much success, in spite of offers of help from local volunteers like Edward Heath. At one point Radji even fantasises about blowing up the BBC transmitter on Masirah Island, off Oman, which carries the World Service to Iran. Radji’s account is an unintended tribute to two often underestimated British institutions: the BBC World ...”

“... Marvell and their cunning ways: they were not Poets Laureate. Who was? Well, the first is usually said to be Ben Jonson, followed by D’Avenant and Dryden, who was given the title officially. Then came Shadwell, Tate, Rowe, Eusden (who celebrated the Duke of Newcastle from whom he received the office and ‘sleeps among the dull of ancient days’ in ...”

“... Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s ...”

“... waters at the thought rather than the thing. A foodie once put a small object into my hand and said with reverence ‘bite that’. I bit as directed and received an impression of nothing, no taste, either good or bad. I commented on this. He beamingly agreed. I had missed the point, which was that he had bought this nugget of smoked mushroom in the market ...”