“... zoo, or theme park, in which to display them as shudder-inducing Dickensian chimeras. That may come. For the time being we condone, with a nod and a wink, what can only be called a policy of unauthorised culling. Clean-handed collaborators, we are able to mime our horror at each freak example that finds its way onto the inside pages of provincial ...”

“... not all forest but is largely made up of human bodies – and not the adumbrations of bodies that may be found in a Forest by Ernst, but palpable flesh and muscle and bone and at the top right an agonised head thrown back. These straining, densely-muscled trunks and limbs locked in a Herculean struggle could well be an allusion, which I cannot yet ...”

“... speculates that ‘her good relations with the USSR did not escape notice,’ and thinks that she may have been ‘gotten rid of’ as a security risk because of her good relations at the same time with John and Robert Kennedy. He has dinner at Nelson Rockefeller’s New York apartment, but assures his Soviet readers that he sat amid the opulence thinking of ...”

“... virtually without framing or critique. The Queen will certainly need a glossary, but even then she may well be uncertain as to just how much Kelman likes his unlikely lad. This kind of thing has been said about Hamlet, to whom, as I say, Kelman alludes. At one point, ‘all he sought was death,’ and the next paragraph has him aching to be ‘out the road of ...”

“... it leaves one issue open, as does the rest of the Dayton Agreement. So wide open, in fact, that it may swallow up all the remaining good intentions contained in the deal. Nowhere is it established who will be responsible for the security or armed forces of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its two entities – nowhere, that is, except in the second part of the Military ...”

“... from her brother in the Army. It is inconsequential and mean-minded, and Tindall suggests that it may only have been kept because it was the last surviving message from the boy. Her investigation of his life leads to the discovery of yet another brother, called Ursin. The mysteries surrounding both remain impenetrable, and at a certain point Tindall has to ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... Mile’s cosmopolitan culture: 35 per cent of its leading firms employed foreigners. The City may have been chauvinistic, but it was not exclusive or insular. It was the latest and perhaps the greatest manifestation of the national myth that Britain’s world supremacy stemmed from her enterprising, outward-looking, seafaring and tolerant character. No ...”

“... feats of giant-toppling! Disgrace / to the ancient Empire of Chlorophyll!’ This may simply be Reid wearing another mask, like Waugh late in life. But somewhere along the way, the inventive energy of his earlier work has given way to formal exercise, just as the ethic of making-it-strange, the ethic of Martianism, has given way to ...”

“... eight hours a day, read other poets voraciously, study their technique and relate it to my own. It may seem a bizarre career change, but to my mind it’s simply a matter of getting on a different bicycle and finishing the same ...”

“... however, is evasive. To stand back and ask how much people take in life, how much they make, may be scholastic, or simply naive, but one cannot help asking why this kind of social theory persists in presenting pre-emptive solutions to a problem over which the more fastidious agonise all their lives. The question about Bourdieu is why someone so ...”

“... think there is a disposition among all classes not to bear with the troubles that may arise in their own houses. If a person is troublesome from senile dementia, dirty in his habits, they will not bear with it now. Persons are more easily removed to an asylum than they were a few years ago.’ In our own day official thinking has come full ...”

“... and self-sacrifice. These were qualities traditionally associated with femininity. Women may be vanquished in her novels, but the feminine is triumphantly vindicated. Her varied and prolonged experience of male incompetence made Margaret Oliphant especially reluctant to cast men in the role of saviours. Her heroes (hardly the right word for the male ...”

“... behave like the lodger, agreeably surprised that I am allowed to make myself a cup of tea. Heaven may turn out to be a sort of hotel, the bills being sent to another place. Entrance qualifications, however, will remain problematic, although one hopes that that original hotelier’s refusal to provide accommodation, on the grounds of there being no room at the ...”

“... Barbra Streisand, helped craft this letter, though schlock sincerity is a tennis staple. Agassi may have felt betrayed, but he wasn’t actually paying Bollettieri much. Similarly, when Bollettieri called Agassi into his office at the academy for persistently flouting rules, defying discipline and being threatened with expulsion from a local private school ...”