“... festoons and sashes and galloons. And yet, while no less a figure of grand respectability than Lord Mountbatten arrayed himself in gems and plumes, a whiff of the ridiculous still clings to these bedizened figures, however powerful. In 1938, in her furious essay Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf denounced peacockery as a display of unearned prerogatives and ...”

“... both. ‘The chapter is perhaps best read as a Hegelian parable, in which the dialectic of the lord and the bondsman [I prefer the old master and slave] is transposed to the struggle of coloniser and colonised.’ Fanon is under the spell of Alexandre Kojève, that crucial interpreter of Hegel for existentialists. ‘“On Violence” tells a story with ...”

“... thereby impressing the congregation (and himself) with his sincerity. Treacher had even heard the Lord’s Prayer delivered in this fashion and found it intolerable and even queasy. But Father Jolliffe, perhaps because of his Catholic leanings, was dry and to the point. ‘Say the word, say the word only’ seemed to be his motto and Treacher added another ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ... Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; – I have heard of Krakens’ (a fabulous Scandinavian sea ...”

“... in his revision of Kilmartin, has altered ‘used to go’ to ‘would go’. In addition, James Grieve’s Swann’s Way offers the refreshingly simple ‘Time was when I always went to bed early’, while Richard Howard proposes going into print with ‘Time and again, I have gone to bed early.’ One can argue the toss indefinitely over the ...”

“... for the Arts and was to play a part in the creation of a new breed of quasi-poor. But what Lord Eccles said chimed with what other people, including economists, were saying. And with this easy elimination of poverty from the mind, it seemed wilfully pessimistic to go grinding on about the have-nots in society – indeed, there was no need to do ...”

“... outlined could be unbearable in the hands of any writer less sensitive than Elizabeth Bowen. Henry James had a similar theme on his hands in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With E. Bowen ...”

“... understood to be, wholly novel: ‘foreign to the Spirit of our people ... too Latin’, thought Lord Curzon. In short, the Cenotaph was built not because of the strength of tradition but because of its failure in the aftermath of 1914-18. Thiepval and the Vietnam Memorial are a slightly different story. The architectural vocabulary of the former is ...”

“... it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the ...”

“... slowly part of the way home in his Armstrong Siddeley. In the car he produced a book of poems by James Joyce from the pouch in the door and told me that he read them when he was stuck in traffic jams. He asked, ‘Did you never think of killing yourself?’ but answered the question himself: ‘You would not know whom to kill.’It is astonishing to me, with ...”

“... in touch now with three of my Jewish school friends, one in America, one here, and then of course Lord Weidenfeld – my old friend Georg – he was kind enough to give me an affidavit.’ If that was a sad term for a head of state to use, he didn’t notice. Had he known about Hitler’s feelings about Jews? Had he read Mein Kampf? He smiled – it is ...”

“... is clear enough about this when he praises select male novelists (among them Richardson, Hardy and James in The Bostonians) for their power of conveying the pressures and intensities of female experience. Long before the arrival of feminist theory it was possible, he writes, ‘for certain male authors to reconstruct themselves temporarily as women for the ...”

“... wrapped up in themselves; and so it is nice to learn from Reid that the young Hughes loved James Thurber. ‘Alright, have it your way: you heard a seal bark,’ exasperated wife complains to anxious husband in the marital bed, while from behind the headboard a seal, unseen by both, looks attentively at something we shall never see. Thurber’s ...”

“... visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was pregnant. An announcement of the wedding ...”