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“... was impressed by the much older William Burroughs; a year later he encountered Jack Kerouac. He read Hart Crane, adopting and adapting the passion for rhetoric, but ignoring Crane’s attempt to comprehend the culture of the past in a vision of contemporary America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos ...”

“... fastidious, a Labour Conference was always disconcerting. Speeches from the floor were solemnly read or delivered with mounting hysteria. Clumsy populist sentiments and extravagant doctrinaire claims were equally applauded. Unpopular remarks might be shouted down. But in an age when the great set speech was increasingly rare and platform oratory out of ...”

“... Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be run by ...”

“... before joylessly making out his fair copy. It is rather unsettling to this engrained prejudice to read the letters of someone like Kenneth Tynan, whose most dandyish prose is the truest expression of himself, who is never more affecting than when preening his affectations. When his writing doesn’t put on the Ritz, when he strains for a less crafted, overtly ...”

“... her charges, beginning when Lilibet was five and her mother ‘the little Duchess of York’. Read Crawfie and you have to adjust to diminutives. Margaret is still described as a little girl when she’s 17. On the other hand, she’s very helpful on history, explaining about Glamis Castle: ‘Here dwelt Macbeth, who is reputed to be by no means the ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... pastoral art. We need not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at ...”

“... I had regained the lean, demented look of a survivor. On the plane (the second, wobbly one) I had read in a local paper that I was indeed ‘flying in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press ...”

“... might not have mattered so much – even in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet there are some unbelievers, Peter Walker is an honourable example – but his style must have been insufferable. It is not only wickedly witty – better, perhaps, even than Galbraith. From a background of Eton, Balliol, the Guards and the Spectator it is the least some might expect (one ...”

“... porcelain skirts. Suddenly in the pearly light of dawn in bursts this red, bullying monster. I read biographies backwards, beginning with the death. If that takes my fancy I go through the rest. Childhood seldom interests me at all. Craven. Driving to Giggleswick on the back road, I see a barn owl. It is perched, eponymously, on a barn and at the very tip ...”

“... just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations ...”

“... that source: deflected by Auden’s idiom towards psychological theorising, he allows the poem to peter out with talk of how ‘the lonely and unpopular’ can rediscover at the museum ‘the landscapes of their childhood’; the attraction of the Pitt-Rivers is reduced to nostalgia for dusty childhood boxrooms. When he attempts a similar accumulation of ...”

“... inclusion, among the author’s acknowledgments, of ‘My thanks, too, to local farmers, including Peter Unwin, for letting me pick their weeds.’ What about those pine tips? Should the Forestry Commission have been thanked too? Jane Grigson’s acknowledgments in her Vegetable Book (first published in 1978) include thank-yous to people who ‘tasted ...”

“... in Mark’s Gospel, which in general avoids such affirmations and times this one to coincide with Peter’s denial. Klassen is sure that at the time of the arrest Jesus addresses Judas (and no other disciple, anywhere) as ‘friend’, but does not acknowledge that hetaire can be otherwise translated – for instance, James Moffat, admittedly rather ...”

“... on holiday when Christopher’s body was found, and that the penny hadn’t dropped even when she read about it at Manchester airport ‘because I knew him as Chrissy and they didn’t call him that in the paper. He was always scrounging, asking for a fag. He could give you a bit of lip but he was all right. I keep thinking we’re going to see him coming ...”