“... It is because he is not locked into any kind of dress-suit that the prose can wave its arms and ball its fists. E.M. Forster, so loyal to Lawrence, is constrained, and his writing, even at its finest, has more or less the kind of liberty that one expects to find within constraint. But Lawrence is unaccountable. Christmas roses, ‘the lovely buds like ...”

“... moans quietly. Obbe breaks the ring pull off one of the cans and lays it ‘on the little pink ball sticking out from the slit. He gives it a quick jerk as though he wants to open her like a can of Coke. Hanna moans louder now and writhes across the duvet.’ Jas intervenes, saying that Obbe is hurting Hanna, though there’s no sign of that and her ...”

“... Tennyson knew this particular story. Do you read through every book given to you as a present? Philip Larkin, reviewing Ricks’s 1969 edition, singled out the lines ‘O why have they not buried me deep enough’ as shapeless and unrhythmical; he managed to find a Larkinesque side of Tennyson to admire (‘Northern Farmer, New Style’), but the general ...”

“... rebel banners while Adams fretted ineffectually and Moran ground his teeth. In Washington, at a ball for the Portuguese minister, Seward warned Britain against war with the US. ‘We will wrap the whole world in flames!’ he announced. There was ‘no power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration’. He ...”

“... as his Philippics, the name given to the speeches Demosthenes wrote warning of the threat posed by Philip of Macedon to the freedom of Greece in the fourth century BC. Amazingly, it seemed for a time as if Cicero’s complex political geometry might hold, but instead Antony and Octavian entered into a formal power-sharing agreement, one of the most important ...”

“... Taken to bed, he misses the ‘monster fête and garden party’, and can do no more at the great ball than greet the 500 guests while leaning on a crutch. A number of other testing occasions, such as his wedding, are largely elided, or are glossed over with phrases such as he ‘never knew how he got through’ whatever social torment it might be. The birth ...”

“... the interplay between a bourgeois hanging on to an ageing modernity and the counter-culture,’ Philip Mann writes in The Dandy At Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the 20th Century (2017), ‘that makes the 1970s.’As Kraftwerk developed their new, distinctive sound, they also evinced a talent for supplying quotes of the sort that on-the-make young music ...”

“... M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed ...”

“... Penrose is one of the biggest names: fellow of the Royal Society in 1972; appointed Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford in 1973; knighted in 1994; Order of Merit in 2000; the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 2008; the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. Several mathematical and physical concepts bear his name: the Penrose-Hawking singularity ...”

“... relationship.’ The whole experience brought home to Virginia a difficult truth. She wrote to Philip Morrell: One cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and spell-bound? The greater openness with her ...”

“... a keen sense of vulnerability. ‘We are fighting an election every day of the week,’ Prince Philip once said of the British royal family. Akihito’s efforts were many times more energetic and consistent, even though Japan doesn’t have a republican movement, and alternatives to the monarchy are almost never debated in the mass media. ‘Ten per cent ...”

“... of the wilderness years was shared by Mitchell’s colleagues. ‘Why didn’t he write more?’ Philip Hamburger, one of Mitchell’s friends at the New Yorker, asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’ The great bulk of Mitchell’s work can be found in the 718-page omnibus volume, Up in the Old Hotel, published by Pantheon four years before Mitchell’s ...”

“... of the coffee house, the optimism of the New Year’s Day concert and the splendour of the Opera Ball. Jelinek’s project was to smash up all of this. In 1976, she made a TV documentary about life in a village in the Austrian Alps. Ramsau am Dachstein had been commissioned as a ‘soft’ account of Austrian rural life, a feel-good travel programme that ...”

“... In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I ...”

“... does appear. The boy can even have his own purposes, as he did in life. He isn’t going after a ball this time, he wants to be born again.To Mitchell’s mind Byatt belongs to that category of writers ‘who achieve virtuosity in both short and long-form fiction’. She began with the novel – the too-traditional novel – in her undergraduate days at ...”