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“... It may not be remembered in the current mammoth Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, but in May 1939, just after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a significant visit to England. His purpose was to deliver four lectures to the RIBA; lectures that he supplemented by showing 16 mm colour films of life at Taliesin West, the Arizona winter home of his peripatetic architectural family ...”

“... are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about ...”

“... gold letters on its cover, into a purple plastic bag, adding bookmark, receipt, a smile, a frank and beautiful smile, still insisting that Stephen and Julia are leaving tomorrow, it could be their last chance ...”

“... is also a refuge.’ After her final release, Frame stayed for a period with the Auckland writer Frank Sargeson, who had been one of the first to recognise her skills. In a review of The Lagoon he commented on the ‘piercing flavour of anguish and suffering’ in the stories: the review appears in the present collection of his pieces, which do much to evoke ...”

“... of both books with a striking combination of silver images and dayglo titles.) In Cocaine Nights, Charles Prentice, the narrator-detective, is a professional travel writer who visits his younger brother, Frank, in southern Spain. Frank had been working as a bar manager in Estrella de Mar ...”

“... the knowledge that Sir Archy MacSarcasm and Sir Pertinax MacSycophant come from a play by Charles Macklin, together with Sir Callagham O’Brallaghan. As it happens, this information is still to be found in the fifth edition, and I suppose it might be vital to somebody some day. Drabble, as this tiny example shows, has used Harvey as a data base, but ...”

“... Did the German physicists make no atomic bombs during the Second World War because they wouldn’t or because they couldn’t? This is the question which Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in the summer of 1945 ...”

“... Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or lubricity. That he greatly enjoyed researching, writing and defending his ...”

“... to have the backing of some powerful though shadowy committee, as when in the first of these Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such ...”

“... and much of it is an account of his own reactions – a kind of personal odyssey. The writer is as frank about himself as about everybody else, and there is none of the smooth smarminess that has become commonplace in the memoirs of successful men. ‘In my case,’ he writes, ‘the chemistry of attraction and repulsion is particularly strong. I am very much ...”

“... songs and recordings, and to favourite singers, some fictional and some historical, such as Ray Charles or Sarah Vaughan. Much of the action takes place at night, or in darkness. A more substantial recurrent theme is that of threatened or collapsing marriages or relationships, some of which are sad and some heartlessly funny. Much of the pleasure of the ...”

“... schoolfellows make allowances for him. Aitken, in the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s ...”

“... in her day-to-day life, the tension remained palpable many years afterwards. According to Charles Bradlaugh’s daughter, Hypatia, ‘she was the most tactless person I ever knew.’ But even for those who disliked her methods, denied her inspiration and opposed her opinions, there was something about her which compelled admiration. To Nehru, who had ...”

“... Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...”

“... so well into Post-Modernism that Neo-Modernism must be just over the hill. Indeed, according to Frank Kermode, we passed out of Palaeo-Modernism some time ago (imperceptibly, one presumes, as through the tail of a comet). He might, however, be consoled by the knowledge that artists themselves are confused, though themselves in turn consoled by remembering ...”