“... who has lived mostly in Oxford during the war, and a strange rather animal young man called Robert Heber-Percy. The latter is like some pleasant kind of animal; on the whole a pony or a stag. He manages the home farm and gardens – and possibly the house. A butler was the only servant visible and we helped ourselves to an excellent lunch – roast ...”

“... that Proust was too much of a snob – but they had a number of friends in common, including Robert d’Humières, the model for Robert de Saint-Loup in A la recherche du temps perdu. D’Humières was working on the French translation of The Custom of the Country when he was killed in action in 1916, and there was ...”

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

“... sent during a Republican congressional picnic on the White House lawn.)*In California, Republican Duncan Hunter – the second congressman to endorse Trump for president – claims in television ads and speeches that his Democratic challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, is named after Yasser Arafat, and is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt by ...”

“... of things to come’ is revised to ‘dreaming’. Ackroyd’s second book of poetry, with its Duncan Grant cover, signalled a homecoming. Title? London Lickpenny. Already, in 1973, the poet was rehearsing pinball-arcade extracts that would resurface, nine years later, in his first novel, The Great Fire of London. The brief flirtation with the obscurantism ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...”

“... efforts. ‘A few Birmingham women achieved fame as Stakhanovites,’ Vinen writes, such as Evelyn Duncan, a capstan lathe operator who ‘broke the world record for shell production’. The war accelerated the migration of people to work in Birmingham’s factories. Though the city was bombed, it got off lightly compared with ...”

“... very smooth, haunting, overlaying melody which you hear. And that’s just what they did with Robert Fripp’s lead guitar. The third instalment in the Berlin triptych, Lodger, was in fact recorded in Switzerland in September 1978, though that wasn’t the reason it didn’t quite live up to the high expectations created for it by its predecessors. The ...”

“... a scene the play is at full gallop. No messing about with Lady M. either. No sooner does she learn Duncan is going to visit than she decides on the murder. Oddities are Macduff’s abandonment of wife and family in order, seemingly, to save his own skin, though the scene in which his wife is discussing this with Ross is unbearably tense, the audience knowing ...”

“... Me Not’; but there we go. I’m not sure which was which; but one of them I sent to Ronald Duncan at the Royal Court. Immense crowd scenes, people standing around, pitying the hero – i.e. me.It sounds very like Duncan.It was. This Way to the Tomb was his big play at the time. I liked that title.You say you also ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... reduces her leverage.’ Others agreed, but they were all ignored, in favour of such sages as Iain Duncan Smith. ‘You have no idea how bad this is,’ Rogers told the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood. ‘She’s put herself in an incredibly weak negotiating position. She’s blown herself up, she just doesn’t know it yet.’We know how it went after that ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”