“... There was no question of a love match. Nevertheless, Florence must have found it painful to read the extraordinary poems Hardy was writing in memory of Emma. Her letters soon begin to cloud with dejection. Like Emma, she was to be childless. Lacking Emma’s spiky feminism – she believed that women were ‘only strong when they realise their weakness ...”

“... she lost the baby, but still wanted Lane to marry her. The hero of marriages is the yeoman Leonard Wheatcroft, who pursued Elizabeth Hawley (‘very fortunate, besides beautiful’) for two years – it took a year of love-letters and months of hand-holding to get Elizabeth’s consent, men weeks of haggling with her father to get his. Arrangements ...”

“... immersion in that environment, and set off the strangeness of the language of Vietnam veteran Leonard Meadows: ‘He mentioned stuff like phosphorous rounds and grenade launchers and flamethrowers as if they were normal parts of the world and just sitting around there in the room to be touched and handled and used on an everyday basis.’ The two ...”

“... disasters in which the book delights. Striking, too, is the fact that her youngest brother, Leonard, who died in infancy, much to Gwen’s distress when she was 14, is simply omitted from her narrative and from the family tree included in her book. But Spalding is too loyal to her subject to face the likelihood that now at least (the nostalgic 1950s may ...”

“... he fled via Italy to Britain, where he accepted an offer from Dorothy Elmhirst and her husband, Leonard, to work on their Bauhaus-ish project at Dartington, not altogether enthusiastically described by Owen Hatherley as ‘that exceptionally British establishment thing, a progressive private school’. It was rather more than that. Gropius was amazed by the ...”

“... to sleep each night. Over the next three decades he became the survivor who wrote the most but was read the least, producing more than thirty books of history (The Administered Man, a study of the deportations of German Jewry), sociology (The Experience of Powerlessness, a study of camp organisation), poetry and fiction, all published on a shoestring in West ...”

“... In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve to death; Peter Adamson (Len Fairclough of Coronation Street), on trial for indecently assaulting children; and, most famously, the comedian Ken ...”

“... dog-fighting is convincing, without being excessive. The bigger the advance you receive, as Elmore Leonard has discovered, the bigger the research team you have to carry: until the novel disappears under its cargo of unassimilated information. Ely’s pitch is pastoral, but sour. All the drift is towards the pit bull combat that provides the book’s ...”

“... think what you did ... was so romantic.’ Tarantino says he was trying to be Elmore Leonard in this script – ‘although I’m not saying it’s as good’ – and he does get something of Leonard’s pace and complication; something of his sense of the world of cops and robbers too, a place where you ...”

“... myth-making. One pamphlet of 1789 says in its preface: ‘the incredible things you are about to read were not invented for pleasure; even if they are a little bit exaggerated for fun, at least the foundation is true.’ The writer then goes on to say: ‘anyone can add what he knows to what he is about to read – and who ...”

“... other with the earnest discussion of books and philosophy that marks the self-taught: rather like Leonard Bast. They were pretty and lively and – once they had recovered from Bert – they got married, mostly to teachers, or returned to existing marriages and settled down with apparent content into a station of life only modestly above what they were born ...”

“... Lawrence, which may have been intended to convey a kinship with Lawrence of Arabia. In Durban he read Trollope to improve his English, and became friendly with two older writers, Roy Campbell and William Plomer, who had started Voorslag, a short-lived but now legendary literary magazine. Both Campbell and Plomer soon turned their backs on South Africa, and ...”

“... through in his disputatious works: ‘I mean not to dispute Philosophy with this Pork, who never read any.’ Certainly he knew too much about more or less everything. He was steeped in classical poetry and almost every line he wrote is in close conversation with one source or another. His relationship to Ovid, beautifully explored in a recent book by Maggie ...”

“... a kind of thing that requires a man to be self-collected. He must be alone with it ... no man can read a Book well with the bustle of three or four hundred people about him! Even forgetting the mere facts which a Book contains, a man can do more with it in his own apartment, in the solitude of one night, than in a week in such a place as the British ...”

“... he would have to give it up. (‘I couldn’t sit there with four students, all eccentric, and read this little script. I just couldn’t.’) So he decided to embark on a training analysis at the local Institute in preparation for a second career. As with everything else in his life, he was first enraptured, then bored – though to begin with, he was ...”