“... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...”

“... pet, was unmarried at nearly twenty-five – ‘a queer little fish’, a feminist, when he took her to Rome in 1889. She had permission (she was musical) to play the organ at St Peter’s. Among the listeners was a middle-aged Prussian officer, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. The Count admired her and pursued her through Europe, but to ...”

“... man, though hardly to redeem him. Purdy’s early stories have nothing so fierce to show. He took more risks in his first novel, the picaresque-satirical Malcolm (1959), but his novel-writing career amounts to a series of lurches towards explicitness and even extremity, alternating with retreats to safer ground. His second novel, The Nephew (1961), is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this comparative disregard lasted well into the war years. His ‘As I please’ column in Tribune amused and irritated, the articles on boys’ weeklies and vulgar comic postcards were a novel approach to popular culture, but they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”