“... for controversy. The novel is tremendously fluent if not precise or subtle – Ring Lardner Jr said that Trumbo’s writing ‘was almost as facile as his speech’. His predilection for a certain kind of freewheeling bombast often led him to take up radical stances he couldn’t maintain. His opposition to war failed to survive Operation Barbarossa and ...”

“... variously at about 50 per cent (1998) and 84 per cent (1999). Lord Callaghan, Lady Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, John Major and Cardinal Winning all met the Commissioners. So did the editors of the Times and the Guardian, Lord Habgood, Lord Howe, the Duke of Buccleuch (the only duke to surface), Professors Scruton and Bogdanor, as well as spokesmen for Ubley ...”

“... My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again.’While she enjoys certain kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to others (washing ...”

“... sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with ...”

“... at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long ...”

“... have put that daunting note in the stage directions. It can’t have helped; I might as well have said: ‘If it can be arranged I’d like this film to be a masterpiece.’ Earlier in life I used to revel in the break from my routine that filming provided while feeling myself as scriptwriter to have as necessary a role as the Make-Up Department or ...”

“... had no idea who the Imagists were. ‘You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra Pound,’ Monro said. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Frost replied.It was an odd narrative to insist on, given that books had been his escape from a struggle-filled, ramshackle early life. He was born in 1874 and spent his first eleven years in San Francisco, where the Frost ...”

“... his early novels. In accepting Catholic authority, writers unleashed their imaginations. As Greene said, quoting Saki, ‘When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become practically limitless.’ But they also pledged to obey authorities who could be as philistine as they were dogmatic. Such tensions are central to ...”

“... first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said … I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch ...”

“... report, safe in the knowledge that neither the miners nor the owners would do the same.The miners said that if some pits really were uneconomic, they should shut. The owners wanted to make all pits profitable again by squeezing the workers. The president of the owners’ association freely acknowledged that in mines producing for export, wages would fall to ...”

“... an aide scribbling on a pad during coffee on the sofa. There might, after all, be something to be said for ‘the hard grind’.The​ veteran political correspondent Peter Oborne is unrepentantly nostalgic for the old order. He begins his philippic, The Assault on Truth, by quoting two sentences in the Ministerial Code: ‘It is of paramount importance that ...”

“... 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 associating with people who were infinitely my social ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... Samuels perpetrated the occasional stinker, and lest the above be taken for a pasting, let it be said that Meryle Secrest has written an entertaining, readable, often very perceptive biography which by no stretch of the imagination could be called vindictive or sensational. And although her style and temper differ sharply from Samuels’s, the early chapters ...”

“... as the emperor’s new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody “got it”. But nobody said it.’ It was a gesture, he concludes, as radical as Wilde’s, who used ‘effeminacy’ to express cultural disaffection instead of finding himself disaffected because, as it happened, he was an effeminate man. Hickey’s preference for undisguised ...”