“... of their marriage, she reported that he did ‘not look well or robust or rumbustious at all. No sign of a woman’s care about him. No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones, I should say.’ Occasionally, he heard reports of Vivienne’s condition from her brother Maurice or Ottoline Morrell, one of the few of ...”

“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”

“... so she did the frame up with some white gloss, which flaked over the years. I used to lie on the hall carpet and look at the picture of the farm for ages; the field was golden enough to run through and get lost in, and the brown daubs of farmhouse were enough to send me into a swoon of God-knows-what. I suppose it was all part of a general childhood ...”

“... you’ll be able to meet more whores than writers and see more pimps than literary agents – no equation intended. If this happens in the metropolis, imagine the colonies. And Havana was the nearest Latin city to urban America – unless you want to insult Tijuana and call it a city. Before 1960 there were a few private houses but these mostly published ...”

“... empirical, habitual, traditional, the adversary of all systematic politics, of reaction no less than reform; a thinker who preferred writing about the Derby to expounding the Constitution, and found even Burke too doctrinaire. The amiably careless, comfortable image is misleading. To set Oakeshott in his real context, a comparative angle of vision ...”

“... with a world of objects, familiar and incomprehensible, recalling a past to which we otherwise had no relation: large buff tea-chests, stamped with ideograms, still lined – is this a trick of memory? – with Chinese newspapers; dusty books and papers, with Chinese characters on the back, in the glass case in the hall; a ...”

“... measure. At their larger gatherings, ecstatic ‘ecological grief’ is indistinguishable from no-nonsense activism as the rank and file enact the apocalypse, and chanters and drummers rehearse the ceremonial music that could hold it at bay.XR’s model has been replicated in dozens of countries, but by far their most successful campaigns have been waged ...”

“... in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He ...”

“... novels of the 1930s and their treatment of violence and war and isolation and said that ‘perhaps no other artist in the English language was so aptly prepared by his earlier psychic life for the experience of wartime Germany, for the shades of humanity who populated Europe.’ In the 1970s Stuart began to write book reviews for the weekly Dublin newspaper ...”

“... lifting furniture into it and other things wrapped in blankets. ‘Will he be coming with us?’ No reply. Which, in its way, was a reply. I was eight; I knew the game.I have no memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny ...”

“... I was in my fifties had also to do with the growing likelihood, I felt, that my natural mother was no longer alive. And that if I were able to establish anything about her, only one of us was liable to come as a shock to the other. I was adopted in the early 1950s, many years before the Children Act of 1975 made it possible for adopted people to inspect their ...”