“... a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause’. In February 1918, when the vote was finally granted to property-owning women over the age of thirty, she was in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons ...”

“... At home in Cambridge, Tunde decides to shower with a bar of black soap. He remembers how, as a young, guilt-stricken Christian, he rejected local traditions: his parents spoke of the spiritual benefits of bathing with black soap, but he preferred Joy or Imperial Leather. ‘He was a city kid and anything that didn’t come in a printed package, anything ...”

“... to pop up every few pages in this biography; it must have felt like a second home to him. As a young man he was gone for years at a time, to Europe in the late 1910s, to the US a decade later. He starved and bludged his way around Icelandic diasporas on two continents: the Icelandic wife of a millionaire in Brighton, the community of so-called ‘Western ...”

“... Confederate soldiers in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government ...”

“... could be seen from a single, central vantage point. In cell after cell where, most recently, young offenders had been held, there was a set of metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small ...”

“... to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been evident in her eyes (younger than the rest of her, Luxemburg insists, by 20 ...”

“... giorno natale.’ Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding. Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”

“... if we are not so daunted, it may be a sign that we are not taking those works very seriously. The young may well feel gratified by the confidence rested in their sophistication: but older readers, who tackled the works before Post-Modernism happened along, are bound to reflect wryly on their pitiful efforts of yesteryear; they must have resembled primitive ...”

“... off her head. A few Pritchettian genteel-weirdos are to be chanced upon around the margins of young Kingsley’s suburban London childhood, but the general picture of those years is as blurred for us as it evidently is, and maybe was, for him. (And no, we do not get told whose idea it was to call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that ...”

“... pregnant, her curly blonde hair gathered at the back of her head, and a dark and sensitive young man, adrift in his suit. Siegfried had evidently been wrecked by the war; he moved from job to job and then, in 1951, got up and left. The Lehmanns were divorced in 1954, and Petra underwent the first of a series of operations on her kidneys, which cost her ...”

“... soon afterwards in a series of cases which brought Holroyd into open revolt. An SAS officer called Robert Nairac gave Holroyd a Polaroid photograph of the dead body of an IRA leader called John Green. Nairac, later to be shot himself, told Holroyd he had taken the picture after personally shooting Green. Nairac said that he and two Protestant terrorists had ...”

“... standards of 1889’) and at 14 became a foundation member of the Left Book Club. By 16 he was a Young Communist and soon found the intellectual discipline of Marxism ‘irresistible’. He did all the Left things. When Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact he saw the Soviet action as ‘sensible, logically defensible and indeed ...”

“... last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we have a crime that cried out for vengeance, with its ...”

“... friends. The letters haven’t much to say about these books, except for a very good one to Robert Trevelyan about Where angels fear to tread. Mostly, the letters are home thoughts from abroad, weekly reports from some frontier of feeling Forster had either crossed or backed off from. You wouldn’t learn from the letters what it meant for him to fall ...”