“... grimly dramatises its author’s terror. Closer to home, and to the immobility against which the young Edith chafed, is the ‘static force’ of Lily Bart’s aunt in The House of Mirth (1905): ‘To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.’ Long after Wharton herself ...”

“... took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse ...”

“... in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice. Dripping with froideur, an imperious Mandelson nailed the upstart coalitionists for their absurd sense of entitlement. Hannah Rothschild’s vanity promo, unaccountably ...”

“... and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch.’ He thought about having sex in the shower with the young man; he contemplated ‘the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation’. But then he realised that he was, in fact, a respectable married man with three children who dreamed of having his face on a stamp. ‘But then there are the spiritual facts: my ...”

“... and Wollstonecraft, the real ‘wife’ of Shelley. Even Mary’s role as a mother (one child, Percy, survived) is represented as inferior to her own, and in a way tormenting to Mary because it evokes so deliberately the spirit of Wollstonecraft: A legitimate child is to its mother nothing but a task that was imposed upon her, a labour extorted from her ...”

“... letters by James to be published came in two volumes, overseen by the James family and edited by Percy Lubbock; they contained 403 letters and appeared in 1920, just four years after the novelist’s death. Lubbock found Mrs William James, the formidable widow of Henry James’s elder brother, moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and ...”

“... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...”

“... World War earned him a CBE. Both fathers were much loved, and both died suddenly at a relatively young age. Neither daughter received much in the way of formal education, but each took every available opportunity to educate herself. There the resemblances end. Warner’s stroke of luck was that her mother’s subsequent remarriage freed her to pursue an ...”

“... of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel,’ he wrote. His essay cheers young writers on, pushing them, against English habits of gossip and insularity, towards an organic wholeness in their work. He argues for fiction that is unafraid of new subject matter and multitudinous perspectives, advising writers to try ‘to catch the ...”

“... 2002 it had plummeted to $8000. The population had quadrupled since 1970: a quarter of a million young men enter the inhospitable labour market each year. Actual conditions cannot be determined with any precision; officially, unemployment is around 10 per cent, but it may be as much as three or four times that among the ...”

“... of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered ...”

“... ITV’s blandishments partly because his father had worked in the BBC before him (my grandfather Percy created the Midlands region of the BBC five days after the company was founded), but mainly because he believed in the institution. A week after he retired, he voted in the 1979 general election. It is an index of the change which that election wrought that ...”

“... emporium known as Needles and Pens, inevitably staffed by heavily tattooed, formerly middle-class young people with nose rings and huge (surely painful?) metal disks and Bantu bangles lodged in their earlobes. Despite this cluster of interrelated terms, I have to say that I think Dubuffet, originator of the art brut label, had the conceptual emphasis ...”

“... but it is safe to surmise that any admiration he felt would be quite severely qualified. So with Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), one of the books we who were undergraduates in the 1930s were persuaded to read. Lubbock was a disciple of James and a strong point-of-view man. Forster treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been ...”

“... views were expressed, and, when it came to the last question, a dry, shrill voice, coming from a young man, rose to a peak: ‘I think Dad looks best stark naked.’ There were restrained cries of ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ and generous applause. As these words reached me, sitting at my desk and writing a partly confessional work, which I recognised at the time ...”