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“... 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 ...”

“... to study Havering make it hard to know what conclusions to draw from the results. Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had ...”

“... a longing for rescue from what seemed the hopelessness of capitalism. There were those, like Edward Upward, who believed (and, I think, believe) that Communism was never even tried, that the whole of Soviet history is a monstrous deviation, its extent marked by the almost unimaginable cruelty of Koba. Amis has tried to render that cruelty ...”

“... is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”

“... Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.”’ If Lang’s truncated life ever was made into a movie, this scene might open it.As Rosa Campbell points out in her introduction to The Miraculous Season, a new and expanded selection of ...”

“... and spent their last twelve years cohabiting chastely in a single cell. Andronicus, it’s said, never recognised his former wife.What did it mean – physically as well as metaphysically – to ‘become male’? In his provocative study of Byzantine sex and gender, Roland Betancourt points out that more than the adoption of masculine dress was at ...”

“... easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and ...”

“... like it at the time, but it was a gift, really. About me personally he seldom took issue. If I said something judgmental about someone he’d give me a look. I was once walking down the street in Berkeley with another poet, quite famous, a truly reprehensible shit. He doesn’t care for me either. We’ve just had a rather uncomfortable cup of coffee ...”

“... of its high rollers and low riders. ‘This is where it’s happening and I’m part of it,’ he said about the thrill of Hollywood in its heyday; the compulsion to be near the hot centre never left his restless heart. Somehow he was always in the frame, writing his name on the barbarous history of his times. ‘Clancy was here’ was the motive for his ...”

“... had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book Childhood and Society began to take off; it peaked in 1970, when his picture appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and a Berkeley sociologist quoted by Friedman ...”

“... in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form of an essay that appropriated Feigen’s question for its ...”