“... The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly … The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... Indo-European linguistics and Ernest Gellner’s essay on Bronislaw Malinowski; then back to John Anderson – the 1938 editor of Tacitus – as a prelude to the vital (yet en passant) observation that ‘the history of modern ethnology is inseparable from that of nationalism’; and so to Franz Boas, antiquarianism, assorted reflections on L’Esprit ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”

“... that a fair number of Gould’s contemporaries-Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Grafman, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, to mention a few of the most gifted – succumbed to mysterious illnesses and had to curtail appearances and whole careers. The extremity of being out there alone, day after day, sooner or later catches up with one, especially if, as in Gould’s ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and ...”

“... Hugh had stuffed them with insurance policies. Some days the women went down to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have ...”

“... memoir. ‘Long black carpets, extending from the street to the entrance of the exhibition hall, bore the emblem of the show,’ he writes: ‘a “No U-Turn” traffic sign signalling there is “no turning back”.’ Rumour had it that a wealthy expatriate Chinese collector wanted to buy up the whole thing and restage it abroad. China had been off ...”

“... to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection’. The process results in a hall-of-mirrors effect. Spontaneity is lost and disorganisation and fragmentation follow. What is called reality becomes alien and frightening. There are a number of paradoxes here, especially for the writer. All-powerful creator, he is himself a literary ...”

“... No Enemies of Promise here as for his half-hated friend Connolly. If Waugh had seen a pram in his hall, he would probably have been mortified; his reaction as a writer when his wife had babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities ...”

“... by Cape in 1980, and then by Penguin and Vintage, except with a new, enthusiastic introduction by John Banville and a useful short bibliography. Bowen is one of those rare writers who is equally good at novels and short stories; in fact, because her novels are short, densely written, formally deliberate, it’s not easy to particularise any difference between ...”

“... does occur; they hear his call, which leaves the air on the ‘dark stair’ and in the ‘empty hall’ of the ‘lone house’ ‘stirred and shaken’, while their failure to answer is experienced by the Traveller as a response in itself: ‘And he felt in his heart their strangeness,/Their stillness answering his cry.’ The parting command that he ...”

“... agrees that she was and remains a brilliant natural performer. Whether speaking to a crowded hall or to a single voter on a doorstep or to her fellow pundits in a television studio, she is in her element. It is not just that she is fluent, vivid and engaging: she speaks in a way that erases distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ...”

“... by another tribunal, set up to inquire into the crude allegations of the gutter press after a spy, John Vassal, had been discovered in the Admiralty. Vassal, a homosexual who had worked in the private office of a junior minister, Tam Galbraith, had been blackmailed by the Russians into giving them information. Galbraith, who offered his resignation, which the ...”