“... The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, James Holland, James Fitton, James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of design and of children’s books and ...”

“... might have been hard for Forster to understand, but she is of the company of Mrs Wilcox and Mrs Moore of A Passage to India. Of course novels are nearly always, in some proportion, a mixture of magic and faits divers, and Forster is adept not only in the representation of manners, in the provision of social detail, but in otherworldly links, in ...”

“... oral sex.’ On the other hand, we’re told later that after marrying the virginal Terry Moore on a yacht outside the five-mile limit so that the marriage wouldn’t be legal, he ‘massaged her clitoris, using a Japanese technique of arousal that overcame her inhibitions’. Unfortunately for inhibited women everywhere (except in Japan), Higham ...”

“... Co opened in 1919. In the window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French ...”

“... the 8 p.m. cup of cocoa.’ The letter was written on 15 November 1951, a few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his appetite for gossip is undiminished: ‘Is it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only ...”

“... All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the Dismembered sweetly apostrophising his body as he is tortured: ‘Go third toe, to thy companions, and as the grain of wheat bears much fruit, so shalt thou rest with thy fellows unto the last day ... Be comforted, little toe, because great and small ...”

“... to her, asking if she could get me into the movies. Within a few weeks I got a letter from Lola Moore, for forty years the biggest kids’ agent in Hollywood. She represented Tommy Rettig, who was in River of No Return, Jon Provost, who played Timmy in Lassie, Karolyn Grimes, who played Jimmy Stewart’s daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Eugene ...”

“... particularly admired by C.S. Peirce, and more recently by Roderick Chisholm and Keith Lehrer. G.E. Moore read him, learnt from him, quoted him in his early work and then forgot the debt, while transmitting some of his ideas to Wittgenstein. Gareth Evans was a forceful advocate of his views. But today he is known to most analytical philosophers only for one ...”

“... posts – ‘her support network and her playground,’ in the words of her great friend Suzanne Moore – disappeared. And I can’t check the posts that started appearing last summer, about terrible back pain, useless doctors, scans and X-rays, and anyway, we all know now the direction in which all this was pointing. Death, death, death, as Deborah and I ...”

“... don’t see him now. I haven’t seen him since George died.’ Tugs were barrelling into Bramley Moore dock, half a dozen of them, one after another, the fleet of Cory Towing of Liverpool returning to port in the early afternoon. Cory’s had taken over Rea’s business. I watched the tugs from the dockside; so did the taxi driver who had brought me down ...”

“... Oldham, Swift, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Dryden, Burke, Addison, Steele, Richardson, Boswell, Thomas Moore and Jane Austen. Rochester to Burke come under the rubric of satire; Addison and Steele to Austen, under that of sentiment. The question, what is Rawson up to, might then be rephrased: what is the link between satire and sentiment, as exemplified in these ...”

“... flush out the devout, the fluent genuflection before entering the pew the first indicator. Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service ...”

“... she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything ...”

“... of the possible scope of NSA operations in December 2005 when the New York Times ran a story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on massive warrantless surveillance: ‘Bush Lets US Spy on Callers without Courts’. The government was demanding and getting from the telecoms all the records it wanted of calls both to and from their customers. But the feed had ...”