“... made grand claims for the trilogy’s literary merit, drawing favourable comparison with Robert Graves, whose I, Claudius was a bestseller in 1934. A minority have cut their compliments with complaints about the flat-footedness of the narrative, the thinness of the characterisation and the colourlessness of the ‘cardboardy’ prose. The tale is told as if ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... for the spectacle. The leaders of the procession arrived at Glasnevin Cemetery, the site of the graves of Parnell and some of the other Fenian leaders, at 4.30, but it took two more hours for the coffin itself to enter the gates of the cemetery.There are many accounts of the day in the Bureau of Military History in Dublin. They emphasise the significance of ...”

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

“... from the flaming tuvva pans in their poky kitchens; buttery diets later to send them to premature graves would form tyres round their middle-aged waists; they’d not be able to sleep at night because of the back trouble they had developed from stooping over Singer sewing machines both at work and at home. As a reward for these sacrifices they would be ...”

“... them: ‘The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear.’ And near the end, passing by the graves of soldiers, Welsh gainsays in voiceover his professed cynicism and egoism: ‘If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours.’ When the men of C Company arrive in Guadalcanal, the camera ...”

“... violently. I’m told she makes a speciality of stealing brides on the eve of their weddings.’ Peter Owen, who published many of Bowles’s books, wrote: Jane’s maid, Sherifa (sic) placed a nasty ‘magic’ mess (congealed blood, hair etc) under a potted plant, hoping it would influence Jane to give her money. When Jane was in the Málaga ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... is no special cello in Lasker-Wallfisch’s story. (Born Lasker, she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch after she emigrated to Britain; they helped found the English Chamber Orchestra.) Kennedy offered to try to track down the one she lost in the Holocaust, but she wasn’t interested: ‘It was a different life.’ (That cello was a not-so-distant ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break them up for landfill. Of course. Graffiti the plaques and take down the statues, because the joy of execration must match the original sin, when we made heroes out of these damaged and damaging ‘entertainers’. We suddenly wish them to have ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them? I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe sometime in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not ...”

“... coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves ...”

“... a complicated bastard, which is why he needed so many alter egos (Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol) to thrash himself out.Any efforts at fine-shading Roth’s behaviour with women into a three-dimensional portrait runs into the problem of his two marriages. If any man had been shaped by nature and disposition to be a permanent bachelor, a ...”