“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... accounts of this period, such as Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) by the German literary critic Peter Bürger, the project of aesthetic purity, which we used to call ‘modernist’ (as in abstract painting), and the mission to reconnect art and life, which we used to label ‘avant-garde’ (as in Dada or surrealism), are usually distinguished as two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in an 18th-century house, brought up, truth to tell, in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Women in the camps were given a temporary reprieve from the gas chamber on condition that they read to her. Was her inability to read being offered as a partial excuse for her crimes? Was Schlink playing on the emotions of his readers in order to blur distinctions where, for the sake of history and justice, there should ...”