“... was an apprentice dandy but too ‘irredeemably heterosexual’ (in the words of his schoolfriend Anthony Blunt) to fully enjoy the jokes that mattered. In the Thirties, he tried hard to turn himself into a socially-conscious poet but was too riven by self-doubt, by the awareness that ‘If it were not for Lit. Hum. I might be climbing/A ladder with a ...”

“... exile syndrome. The others, too, fitted into familiar categories. There were those whom Anthony Heilbut has called the ‘bei unsers’ and ‘ach so specialists’, who compensated for lack of recognition in their new environment by exaggerating the merits of the old country and their potential status in it. Aficionados of 1930s refugee humour will ...”

“... repository of the Reithian BBC’s nationalised moralism and authority. The following week, Joan Smith pursued a similarly dangerous line in the Independent on Sunday: ‘In recent days ... those of us who are not willing to pretend to emotions we don’t feel have been getting an ominous message – that we ought to keep quiet. It’s a message which is not ...”

“... Anthony Holden’s is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have followed Joan Plowright and himself into the theatre ...”

“... for the quick sketch that captured the essence of a man in a few physical details. Logan Pearsall Smith called him ‘the Rembrandt of English prose’. In his French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian ...”

“... to be at least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as ...”

“... at club. Back here 9 to read Lucretius with Richmond and Dodgson. Then at 11.15 went in to F. Smith and had long talk about marriage. Bed 12.30, an hour later than usual. This is certainly energetic; but it is entirely institutional. John Cann Bailey might as well be writing his piece on Gibbon in the way that he reads Lucretius, ‘with Richmond and ...”

“... Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect ...”

“... had the reputation of giving out more prizes than any other school; at least one of them came to Anthony.’ So too with the unpaid ‘school bills’ at Winchester that the autobiographer tells us caused him so much wretchedness (‘I suffered horribly!’). In the biographer’s version, there were no unpaid bills and no consequent horrible suffering. Old ...”

“... go before the Supreme Court) the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in ...”

“... necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas ...”

“... dealings with RKO, and he seems to have supplied the master-clue to the portrayal of the tycoon Smith Ohlrig in Caught. A suggestion of violence suffuses the film, and Caught has often been classified as film noir, though not one blow is struck anywhere in it. What people are feeling when they set it alongside Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Big ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of ...”

“... my friend Clem who has more to do with it than anybody’; Jules Olitski’s shifting colours; Anthony Caro’s decisively abstract steel sculptures. Karen Wilkin writes in the catalogue of his collection that Greenberg didn’t miss the art he sold, but surely he winced as works by David Smith, Jackson Pollock or Morris ...”

“... just such a reaction chain. When the host, the comedian Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For several days afterwards, countless commentators, celebrities and social media users sought to distinguish ...”