“... of the battle between Private Eye and the financier Jimmy Goldsmith from January 1976 to May 1977. The Eye had been investigating possible links between Wilson and the KGB, using material leaked to them by MI5 – the first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged ...”

“... in many ways so essentially the same as they were so long ago that I must make an admission which may be a confession: Experience has taught me nothing.’ The publication of these curiosities now can only re-affirm the drift of this self-analysis, and deepen our awareness of the extraordinary misunderstandings that accompanied Schwartz’s enormous original ...”

“... by conjunctions. The ‘lists’ are arranged with the most delicate prosodic care, as anyone may discover who will beat time through the sentence quoted above, counting syllables, noting the incidence of stresses, observing above all the rhythms of expansion and contraction in phrase length. There is an elegant command of the metres of prose; and swathed ...”

“... most dangerous room’ while in ‘A Nocturnal Breakfast’ he announces: ‘I think this may be/The last ever breakfast.’ The vein of comic surrealism which this exploits is, at times, similar to Monty Python. Like the best of Python, Woodward’s poems can be eerily and blackly humorous: like the worst of Python they can be fey and palely ...”

“... This scenario mostly applies to the non-vulnerable missing – that’s to say, people who may deliberately go missing for reasons of their own. It applies less to the unmissed, or to vulnerables whose disappearance is much more sinister. There is no big deal, for them, in turning away from the documents of the past. For runaways and abuse victims and ...”

“... things you have done like washing my clothes, or darning my socks ... Although by themselves they may seem trivial and matter-of-fact, do not be deceived by that because they constitute the demonstration of the love which we have for each other, and to me they are of the highest value, for without them our love could not live. Betty, like Coover’s ...”

“... to their wives’ sexual needs. But what about couples who wanted to stop having children, who may well have been in the majority? Many GPs were also propagandists about the terrible dangers of masturbation – an idea that had taken root at the beginning of the 18th century, and which doctors were still spreading right up to the end of the 19th century ...”

“... was saying, of father. ‘But will he get anywhere?’ ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. But he may be a touch ...’ Azhar stood on tip-toe to listen. ‘Over hopeful. Over hopeful.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Tell him to read more Gibbon and Macaulay,’ he said, ‘That should set him straight. Are you feeling ...”

“... it remains a wonderful book, and a prime concern to lovers of Ford; Saunders does it justice. It may seem useless to complain that doing so much justice makes this biography too long. Saunders looks into every corner and does a lot of literary criticism along the way; one feels, as his prose rolls equably on and the notes pile up, that this is a celebration ...”

“... judged right to include the ribald verses ... The editor is aware that such scabrous exuberances may lend themselves to either the wrong kind or the wrong amount of attention.’ But Ricks makes the case for including them, of which the most important points are ‘that the ribald verses constitute part of the story of the poet’s transition from the ...”

“... Is it surprising that the poems should be so strong and straight when the poet was so devious? It may be that the second condition causes the first. Rilke doesn’t have too much in common with Brecht, but both of them probably knew so much about grace and courage because they had an intimate and harrowing experience of what it meant to lack them. There is a ...”

“... breasts) and feature cartoons of naked women on top of one another. He also claims that Barnes may have been raped by her father, but more likely by a friend of her father’s, with his knowledge. Barnes’s mother, an Englishwoman who had been ‘adopted’ by Zadel, gave her inheritance to her new husband, only to see it shared with other women, and to ...”

“... European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course is the subject’s greatest challenge. Few if any of us possess the necessary breadth of knowledge and skills which such a wide-angled view of the ...”

“... he had in his early verse. In 1845, he had ventriloquised a little charmer’s reproof: ‘What may I do?’ at length I cried, Tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied, And said, ‘You must not ask.’ By 1887, when he added an envoi to a new edition of Looking Glass, a fairy sets aside ‘tricks and play’ to send her Christmas greetings to ...”

“... with several pints of lager at Egan’s in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in and the ‘bad form’ Nora called it when the requiems had to be moved up a day and a perfectly enjoyable wake foreshortened by the misbehaviour of Mrs ...”