“... debaucheries on the island are sickening – including the oral and anal rape of sometimes very young children; on one occasion he broke the legs of two brothers who complained – but whether or not they are true (and there’s no particular reason to doubt them entirely), and whatever his moral failings, Tiberius’ political error was to have abandoned ...”

“... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...”

“... love of fools and foolishness, that she turned back to them. It is the same with the absurd Sir Edward, who ‘knew his business’ when it came to seduction, and who thinks that Timbuktu would be an ideal venue for the rape of Clara Brereton, although his indigence ‘obliged him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The ...”

“... non-prescriptive approach: for it must have been what inspired the ‘composite’ biography by Edward Nehls of thirty years ago, in which the biographer stood aside and allowed the torch of narrative to be handed on from one to another of a relay of competing voices. This seems to raise some fundamental questions about biography, or at least literary ...”

“... he was bored with it. His mental turmoil and bitterness was exacerbated by the death of two young wives in childbirth, which destroyed the little spiritual comfort that his austere brand of Unitarianism had ever given him. Avowedly puzzled about the purpose of existence, he was driven on by the psychological need to pit himself against all ...”

“... produce, For thro’ thy pocket oozed the viscous juice.                   Edward I scorn a tell-tale, or I cou’d declare How, leave unask’d, you sought the neighbouring fair; Then home by moon-light spurred your jaded steed, And scarce returned before the hour of bed. Think how thy trembling heart had felt affright, Had not our ...”

“... and configurations of the 19th-century world. One would have thought, for example, that, after Edward Said’s Orientalism and the important work of Christopher Miller on Baudelairean ‘exoticism’, the youthful trip to the Ile de la Réunion would have produced something more analytically strenuous than references to ‘his Oriental ...”

“... Greene, and by informers like Baines and Cholmeley – were just the opposite. They show him as a young man who constantly and recklessly broadcast heretical, free-thinking views. He considered religion a political tool to ‘keep men in awe’. He persuaded people to atheism, ‘willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins’. Even allowing for ...”

“... whale lives by getting between the harpoon and the whale. Lamb’s book instead has pictures of young people holding up placards saying ‘Who Needs Sperm Oil?’; of a bus with a David Bowie poster on the front because FoE persuaded Ziggy Stardust himself to dedicate a performance to Save the Whale. FoE also took out quarter-page adverts in the ...”

“... despair, and die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through ...”

“... the normal pattern of a successful career. It may be that this preferment was connected with the young Henry III, who was released from the control of his guardians in the early 1220s, and whom Grosseteste may have served as secretary and keeper of his secret seal. With his new independence, Grosseteste went to Oxford, where he was from about 1225 to ...”

“... to have created a ‘classic’ Underground image and tradition: signs, a language for posters, Edward Johnston’s alphabet, Henry Beck’s diagrammatic map and so forth. All this has survived in more or less watered-down form. Even now it has been only partly upstaged by the swagger and individualism of the new Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...”

“... it seems to make superfluous the whole later development of the cheesecake genre. A shamefaced young woman looks quizzically at the photographer while fending off a half-tumescent man who simultaneously kisses her and displays her genitals to the camera (in today’s convention, a more dishonest one, she displays them herself). How appropriate, one ...”