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“... of whom were beaten, tortured or raped; and that an exodus from the country of roughly two million took place – most of them people who thought their lives were in danger. Two among the thousands of case-histories investigated by the Commission provide proof and symbol of the kind of crimes that were being committed while a not entirely ignorant world looked ...”

“... had now discovered the work she was born to do; each book thereafter was an erudite game and she took great pleasure in it, testing her own intelligence and the intelligence of her readers, now a much reduced party. It probably did not help her British sales that in 1968 she moved to Paris, taught linguistics and related subjects, and was soon in close touch ...”

“... preceding Classes’. Even this relatively simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... imagination, and went so far as to doubt whether his works should be called poetry. Matthew Arnold took this line further, dismissing Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’. Attacks on Pope’s morals also continued in the 19th century: C.W. Dilke was shocked to discover that Pope had ‘cooked’ a few letters in his published correspondence by ...”

“... Not O’Malley, however; briefly elected to the Dáil as a symbol of resistance, he never really took part in its proceedings, retaining the old IRA-man’s suspicion of ‘politics’. His return to his medical studies didn’t work out either. From the mid-Twenties, increasingly disillusioned, he travelled in Spain and Italy, subsisting on small handouts ...”

“... way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to continue. When, twenty years later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first American President born in this century, stood and took the oath of office it seemed to many of his fellow countrymen that the stewardship of daring had finally found its vindicator. The great ...”

“... when he did listen he had an infallible prescription for staving off the menace. The prescription took the simple form of doing what the Tories would have done ten years before – but of trying to square it with the Unions. The end-result was a sort of Weimar without the sex: the country mortgaged to the IMF; placemanship and jobbery everywhere from the ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... more than seventy years in this hard world, comes before it as an optimist? The handsome head of John Redcliffe-Maud, alias Sir John Maud, GCB, CBE and what else, alias Baron of the City and County of Bristol, looks from the dust-cover with a questioning half-smile. In his Bath robes? Not a bath-robe, anyway, though it ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... Behymer Dorn died of pancreatic cancer, on the cusp of the millennium, in December 1999. He took his alien, the tumour, with him. Which, as he reported in ‘The Decadron, Tagamit, Benadryl and Taxol Cocktail Party of 1 March 1999’, from Chemo Sábe, gave him considerable satisfaction. The tumour was interested in what interested him, but not ...”

“... the cheek to answer back. It was never easy for Empson to have a civil discussion with anybody who took a deviant view of matters he believed to be much more important than an opponent’s feelings. And yet he would never have pulled rank. He was generous-minded, affectionate, a very likeable man; he just thought that people who ...”

“... It is an image that has inspired varied imaginative treatment down to our own times, in films like John Boorman’s vulgar and energetic epic Excalibur or Bresson’s stark, pessimistic Lancelot du Lac. It is rumoured that Jancso is now preparing a film, inspired by the work of Georges Duby, of the great clash of knights at Bouvines (1214), one of the few ...”