“... hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children,’ Major remarks in My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, ‘the talent to entertain was not among them,’ which must be one of the ...”

“... no coincidence that the first objects that fall from the incised stomachs of captured sharks in Peter Benchley’s Jaws are car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which ...”

“... more familiar tum-ti-tum verses, which, as the Sunday Express showed, was all too easy: Have you read the latest Betjeman? But, my dear, you simply must! He’s adored by Princess Margaret; Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain ...”

“... briefly flirted half-heartedly with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists herself. ‘Prod’ – Peter Rodd, her quite fabulously dull husband – ‘looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh years later, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then, and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Fans of Nancy Mitford have her novels, her ...”

“... alloy with a sphere gleaming at its zenith – Rolling Moon. In black felt-tip near its base I read: ‘I will always love my beloved boyfriend Alan Cousins for eva 12.5.91.’ Is this vandalism? According to the recently retired maestro of Grizedale, the forester Bill Grant, only one thing has ever been destroyed there: the crows, which were trashed by a ...”

“... You must leave life for that. No But always to preserve the adventive Minute … I’m tempted to read ‘you must leave life for that’ as meaning we must leave such things to life itself; but that is not what the phrase says. Durrell’s Quartet is an attempt at a masterpiece of size (and shape and time), but he didn’t leave life for it. He stayed with ...”

“... joy’) and – though there is no trace of it in their letters – it seems a safe bet that they read it together over Christmas.Another matter on which Wittgenstein shared his intellectual concerns with his family was that of sainthood. The fact that he had once told Russell he was interested in becoming a saint was perfect fuel for the Cambridge ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... her diagnosis to keep his attention, her act bolstered by the case histories of schizophrenics she read in the public library (‘It’s masturbation,’ she told him, ‘worry over masturbation’). She wrote her notion of schizophrenia into the stories she let Money read, and which he showed to a publisher. Then, as enough ...”

“... it aloud it would be both quicker to do and the result smoother and more satisfying. But I sight-read it as often as not which, since it’s generally something I’ve written, doesn’t much matter and I generally get away with it. Still, I always think my style, such as it is, is a compound of all my deficiencies, but maybe that’s what style is ...”

“... after his childhood that he kept with anything like childhood thoroughness; a number of others peter out like abandoned resolutions or with a characteristic Forsterian admission that he knew too much about a place in advance to be able to experience it. In Italy in 1901, ‘I have got it up so well that nothing comes as a surprise’; on a first Greek ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say ...”