“... think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to ...”

“... had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM. 27 January. To Leeds by the 9.10 train with snow flurries much of the way. I call at the British Epilepsy Association, where I have to sign some books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the ...”

“... for independence was a call for decolonisation and national awakening,’ the Armenian academic Philip Gamaghelyan told me.Central to that nationalist movement was the memory of the 1915 genocide. ‘Genocide is a major trauma in Armenia and central to its identity, determining historiography and school curriculums,’ Gamaghelyan said. The Armenian ...”

“... Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around ...”

“... fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised mayhem between consenting adults, has a ...”

“... but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a minute, his scepticism having been awakened early on by the frontispiece (you can’t get much earlier in a book than its frontispiece), obviously had been taken in and felt ...”

“... Imam, a once-and-future Comic Genius, who will arrive when we need him. They are one less than Snow White’s attendants, being only six, though here too there is always one you can’t remember when you try to list them late at night. With me, it is Pamela, number two in the nursery, the most victimised of the Mitford Sisters, condemned to suffer not only ...”

“... gold, snowgrass gold, penny-orange orange, milk white, snowberry white, all lit by the sky of snow light reflected from Antarctica or, as we knew it, from Mother’s constant reference, “the South Pole, kiddies”’. Her mother, a Christadelphian who communicated her sense of wonder to her daughter, wrote poems which were published in newspapers and ...”

“... was a problem, and he began wearing a toupee in the early 1950s.Warhol started to work for Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar. He remembered ‘the humiliation of my bringing up my portfolio’ to her ‘and unzipping it only to have a roach crawl out and down the leg of the table. She felt so sorry for me that she gave me a job.’ His speciality was shoe ...”

“... her adolescent attachment to her mother was both pious and grandiose: Pure as a lily, as white as snow, Spreading sunshine, where e’re she may go, Spotless beautiful, and sweet, Giving her wisdom to whom she may meet. Lovely as the morning sun; Bewitching as the evening sky, Always striving, working to conquer, At least to try. Alas, poor Mercedes: she ...”

“... according to Martin Amis the poet is defined as a person who is incapable of driving a car. Philip Larkin, the great Eeyore of English verse, pushing his bike through a Hull graveyard, white raincoat and clips, misted spectacles, for a John Betjeman documentary. David Gascoyne, after years of silence, came to Cambridge for a poetry festival in 1975. He ...”

“... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before ...”

“... I was planning to do instead might have seemed inappropriate. On the train back I run into Jon Snow, who is returning from Bradford where he has been making a programme about the decline of the city. I note that at Kings Cross, unlike me, he goes home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... rivals, including an Irish horse called Yahoo. Still, when Desert Orchid ploughed through mud and snow to cross the line just ahead of Yahoo, in the most exciting horse race I have ever seen, we all stood and cheered. It was a disastrous result for the bookies, who lost a fortune to the ignorant housewives, and it wasn’t much better for our regulars, who ...”