“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I trotted out years later when Romola Christopherson was taking me round Downing Street. ‘I suppose for Mrs Thatcher,’ I sneered, ‘Piper is the acceptable face of ...”

“... When in his late teens and early twenties he began his career in London, people noted how ‘young and schoolboyish’ he was. His diaries from that time record enthusiasms for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... sun’s early light revealing not bands of merry shepherds tripping blithely to the fields, but a young chimney-sweep preparing to remove the accumulated filth of coal fires; a maid creeping back to her own bed after a night spent in her master’s (filth, to Swift, of a not unrelated kind); and a handful of schoolboys dawdling with their satchels, reluctant ...”

“... well-known fact that all a working man would ever do with a large award of damages was buy a pub. Robert Stevens in a footnote cites a nice antidote from a law lord in 1833: ‘Here is a contract made by a fishmonger and a carrier of fish who know their business, and whether it is just and reasonable is to be settled by me who am neither fishmonger nor ...”

“... there, and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a ...”

“... the character of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our ...”

“... obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in those favouring Sixties. They started young and went to film school, directing their first features at the end of that decade, each thus joining a rising group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... at all hours of the day and night) jotted down ideas for fear of forgetting them. The young Breuning is intrigued by the appearance of a Beethoven sketch-book, which he finds on a piece of furniture in Beethoven’s apartment (‘it was completely full of notes, written in fits and starts, and even additional staves drawn freehand right across the ...”

“... façade of Lucy’s Edwardian middle-class life? What are they? What are they really? They are a young woman and a young man in Italy for goodness sake, and doesn’t death make that gloriously apparent?One could, at least at first, mistake Checkout 19 for a story of coming-of-age via literature, a genre so often done ...”

“... explained to Darwin that this first translation of any of his work into Greek, undertaken by a young Cretan doctor, Meliarakès, had not been without risk. It required considerable ‘moral courage’ for Meliarakès openly to support such a scientific approach to humans in a country ‘still under the rule of dogmatism’.At home Darwin came under fire ...”