“... mere neighbourliness but is still less ardent than blood brotherhood, however deep the respect may run. Blake says, ‘Opposition is true friendship,’ and though that sounds very bracing, particularly to the argumentative, and subscribing to its wisdom probably works out well for everyone in the best of all possible worlds, among the writers in this ...”

“... with its consequence, ‘the appalling popularity of music’, are critical gestures which may well endear him to us today. Motion is reliable in his distribution of emphasis over the small corpus of Lambert’s compositions, even if short on original insights. One of his apparently striking illuminations – Constant’s ‘habit of writing in a way ...”

“... was fingering them, so I got the impression that he wished me to look at them. At last I said: ‘May I look at those?’ ‘I want you to,’ he answered. ‘I should be greatly obliged if you would run a pencil over them and improve their diction and rhythm.’ I demurred, but he meant what he said. The first ones I read seemed to me of exceeding beauty. I ...”

“... smoke in jail. Detainees are supposed to get a 30-minute exercise period a day during which they may smoke – if they have cigarettes. But for the first few days of my detention I did not have any exercise period. I was craving a cigarette. The interrogations went on. ‘Look, Mrs Kitson, I can get you out of here in one hour, if you just make a ...”

“... has carried across from the 18th century, and is conducive to the lethal truth. ‘King George may be said to have helped by maintaining a level of unpopularity conducive to uprisings.’ ‘His peculiar talent was simply to voice unchanging principles, a sort of indolence which often passes for integrity.’ Such sentences execute Swift’s own principles ...”

“... a ‘Great Sunday Hunt for Mrs Christie’ was organised. The Evening News advised ‘anyone who may have bloodhounds ... to bring them along’. Men should wear thick boots; women Russian boots and tweed skirts. An aeroplane flew overhead. Meanwhile the Yorkshire Police had come to suspect that a Mrs Theresa Neele, who was staying in a seven-guinea-a-week ...”

“... need of the women’s colleges for academic respectability. Yet although segregation of the sexes may – in physical education – have been a necessary phase, there is surely much to be said here, as elsewhere, for collaboration as an ultimate objective. In Roberts’s analysis, too, the distinctive situation of women would be clearer if she more frequently ...”

“... affair with death, a fetishist: distilled from their embodiments as stories, Tournier’s subjects may appear outlandish and bizarre. The fact that in their worked-out form the stories have the credibility of things discovered and merely mediated is partly due to the way Tournier incorporates into them experiences familiar to us all, experiences we recognise ...”

“... of Makarios in order to simplify any future arrangements. Papadopoulos told a Turkish newspaper in May 1971 that the two countries ‘should convince our communities’ – in Cyprus – ‘that we are not disposed to spoil the relations between us and quarrel for their sake,’ while in Cyprus the influence of the junta and the presence of a large Greek ...”

“... for a comparison, most of those already offered in the few comments made on MacGill seem inept. He may be a ‘naturalistic’ writer in some respects, but neither Zola nor Gorky are useful exemplars. George Orwell, also cited here and there as a point of reference, is a little closer, since he, too, wrote about the people at the bottom of the heap. But Orwell ...”

“... and sweat and aching feet, of bouquets and the smell of resin and the sound of applause: you may get the feel of the theatre and the rehearsal room, but rarely the feel of dancing. Nijinska explains exactly how she conceived a role, and then how she set about realising her conception, step by step, movement by movement; how she discovered special ...”

“... beautiful and rich Irish-born musician, Augusta Holmes (or Holmès). As Raitt surmises, Villiers may himself have had hopes of Judith, and possibly of Augusta too, in which case he could well have felt that his friend was getting the best of both bargains. Nonetheless, together with Leconte de Lisle (such choice names!), he attended the wedding as one of ...”

“... fact that J.I.M. Stewart is also the detective writer Michael Innes leads me to think that a clue may be lurking around these uncompromising demises. An innocent question is asked at the mid-way stage of the novel: ‘Who wrote a novel called The Amazing Marriage?’ Penelope Rich, the heroine, knows her Meredith, and can reply to the question, which has very ...”

“... to advantage’ in The Belle’s Stratagem, it seems that her acting and way with the words may have been less pleasing. There were some who attributed her subsequent lack of advancement in London to her Irish brogue. ‘Miss Smithson improves nightly,’ patronised Bell’s Weekly Messenger, ‘and is rapidly losing that drawl, which we presume she ...”

“... warnings: ‘certainty isn’t easy in a world as big and as strange as this one.’ The world may be large and difficult, but Gray’s treatment of it in this novel is uncharacteristically minute. On his first evening south, Kelvin meets Jill, a vapid bohemian; perhaps he even chooses her for her imagined Nietzschean flavour. Jill introduces the homeless ...”