“... I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date back to the late 1940s and early 1950s and bring back all the dreariness of digs and Oxford out of term, Sunday lunches in cafés up ...”

“... who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze up her ...”

“... in this biography, that warm, complicit smile was for everyone. I can’t remember much of what he said. This is because he never said much. He was one of those rare journalists whose way of listening makes other people open up and talk. That’s what this elusive man used his smile for. That, and to take attention and ...”

“... with some degree of truth as ‘the disease so often found in English culture’. ‘Gentility,’ said Mr Alvarez at that time, ‘is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good.’ I doubt if there ...”

“... that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we go where it suits, and don’t bother about the people.’ Possibly because the staff was prepossessing, but also because the place was comparatively remote from more frequented scenes, an occasional ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... realised the harm the footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. His body was discovered some days later. These events brought about a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained ...”

“... dismemberment of health, education and welfare? ‘I wants to make your flesh creep,’ said the fat boy, and that is what the parties set out to do in 1987. As Rodney Tyler’s book shows, the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their ...”

“... the difference between being titled and being entitled. When Kermode accepted the post of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he felt he had ‘become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown’. A knighthood is not a carnival crown, but the drift of this glancing and complicated book is that no ...”

“... material; some were expressing private prayer; some were simply writing a poem. St Augustine said that all things written in the Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked into the ...”

“... to make a name for himself in the history of religion. Another friend, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, had convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated ...”

“... books show how far his literary voice had been suppressed until then.There is little that can be said for sure about More’s intended meaning. We could say fairly safely that his ode to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon on the occasion of their coronation contained a large portion of flattery. He praised the king’s physical capabilities, ‘his hand ...”

“... on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion ...”

“... lost in a Dali-plus-Ernst assemblage.) Writing a year later in the Architectural Review, Nash said that what had triggered the painting in the first place was a shattered elm in a field by the Severn, which had struck him as looking like the horse in Blake’s Pity (he slightly misquotes the lines Blake was drawing on from Macbeth – ‘sightless ...”

“... on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in himself. London and the South-East is a story of a downwardly mobile and ...”