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“... below her house (‘a skeletal figure with two pendulous bosoms dangling from her ribcage like white leather wineskins two-thirds empty; her pruny arms and legs the colour of butterscotch in the bright light’), are infused at once with moral disgust and an almost erotic disappointment. She is transfixed by Hellman’s huge pillowy breasts (‘like ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a ...”

“... fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon ...”

“... its activities, Edward Heath spoke up for it in the House of Commons. In 1969, it was natural that Peter McLachlan, at the time administrator of the NYO and later active at Conservative Central Office, should invite the then Leader of the Opposition to visit the orchestra on its Easter holiday course at a minor public school in Ramsgate, just down the road ...”

“... habits have always been less compartmentally neat than the publishing historians would like. Take Peter Mann’s startling discovery, made some twenty years ago, that the main patrons of Mills & Boon were university-educated women, consciously slumming. This was in line with an almost exactly simultaneous finding by a Presidential commission in America that ...”

“... areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will be spelt out to the visitor. Key works should be isolated in rooms with tiered seating. He is indignant because, in labels ...”

“... an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded to organise a surrender. After the white flag went up an enemy tank opened fire, ‘so I shot the mayor and withdrew.’ Haines cites this as an example of the ruthlessness which enabled Max well to mention the incident ‘casually to his wife, without apparently wondering whether she might think ...”

“... was the ‘repatriation’, through a misunderstanding of the Yalta agreement, of thousands of White Russians who were not Soviet citizens and who should not have been sent to their certain death at the hands of Stalin. Even worse was the handing-over to the Yugoslav victors of thousands of anti-Communist Chetniks, who had at least initially fought the ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-Hall ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”

“... Lawrence recognises that the better.’ He predicted that experimental writing in fiction would ‘peter out’ and that ‘by 1960 the only surviving novels will be those with character and story.’ And he could lack the courage even of such convictions as he possessed: when Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness appeared, he confessed great admiration in ...”