“... stamping of feet was our reply. 9 Supper. The regal dining hall graced by the likeness of Henry the Eighth – those tight-sheathed calves, that beard – all by the sumptuous Holbein limned; inside that singularly towering hall that choir lofts made appear so tall, it was perpetually murky despite the violet conflagration, that filtered through the ...”

“... at last arrived. Not particularly memorable, one church does have a noteworthy memorial:Richard Henry Burden Cattell M.A.Rector of the Warhams 1928-1947Captain of the English Rugby Football team 1900Chaplain to the Forces at Gallipoli 1915.This tablet is placed here in remembrance by his seven daughters.It’s a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett.6 August. All ...”

“... purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight ...”

“... Views on Everything (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great comic ...”

“... reader myself, teacher in every kind of school public and private’, even, one summer, a hotel porter in Maine. No one could accuse him, he told Amy Lowell years later, of lacking life experience. As a light trimmer at the Arlington Woollen Mills in Lawrence, tasked with replacing filaments and mending dynamos, he would hide next to the belt wheel and ...”

“... for me, putting lines unwritten by me, in my voice’. Reviewing a biography of Katherine Anne Porter, in 1982, she was clearly drawing on bitter experience:Our power of documentation has a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence. It makes form out of particles and finds attitude in a remembered drunken remark as easily as in ...”

“... when going by train from Leeds to Morecambe on holiday you knew you were nearly there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In ...”

“... the book is constructed in a series of emotional confrontations, the chapters being given (as in Henry James’s ‘dramatic’ novel, The Awkward Age) the names of the leading actors in each, and the ‘awkward age’ being in this case nearer 67 than 17. The plot concerns retirement and homecoming, ending and reconciliation, and the Welsh setting as Amis ...”

“... with a very strong stylistic stamp, Firbank can easily be thought of as doing just one thing. Henry Green, who learned much from Firbank’s experiments, is another example, the impression solidified by the confusable gerunds of his titles, Living, Loving, Doting. But, like Green’s books, Firbank’s are in fact technically quite distinct from one ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”

“... for so long, as it would be to find a death certificate, or the lack of one. I phoned the Head Porter and explained that I had once lived there and was now wanting to write about the place.‘You won’t be knocking on any doors, will you?’ he asked when I arrived. ‘We’ve got a lot of old people here.’I explained it was just the corridors I was ...”