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“... Parrot and Olivier in America is the singular and surprising offspring of an unlikely coupling between two different novels: one, a fantasia on Tocqueville’s travels in America in 1831, the other a picaresque romance about an Englishman called John Larrit (known as Parrot for his talent as a mimic) who is suddenly and brutally torn from an idyllic childhood as the son of an itinerant printer in late 18th-century Devon and transported to Australia, where he grows up to become a topographical artist and engraver ...”

“... When, some years ago, the Bar’s dining room at the House of Lords was closed and barristers appearing before the Law Lords were given permission to use the Peers’ dining room, younger barristers became quite badly disoriented by seeing elder statesmen who they were confident had been dead for many years lunching at the next table. What they didn’t always appreciate was that it was thanks to a similar cryogenic process that the Law Lords themselves were hearing appeals – as they still are ...”

“... Brooke (no relation); the Hungarian aristocrat Bekassy; the Frenchman Jacques Raverat; and Noel Olivier, the youngest of the four daughters of Sir Sydney Olivier, a Fabian Governor-General of Jamaica. The Oliviers were at the very centre of the Neo-Pagan scene and famously beautiful. The other Neo-Pagan girls were ...”

“... took over, and he remained in his dressing-room, underneath a table, curled up like a baby. When Olivier was playing in The Master Builder he had a less severe attack, cited by Aaron: My cue came, and on I went to that stage where I knew with grim certainty that I would not be capable of remaining more than a few minutes ... I took one pace forward and ...”

“... doomed Chatterton, gracefully draped in his purple breeches against the background of a Bristol dawn, Wallis might seem to have endorsed the romantic conception of his subject while disclosing with unexpected shrewdness the more commonplace frailties of the actual model. Between Kate Horne’s graphic account of the Merediths’ home life and an anxiously ...”

“... time for her ‘quick-coming millennium’, warning that the ‘cold truth’ might eventually dawn on self-sacrificing idealists that ‘the people thank them not.’ Daniell responded with fervour, but Baillie, another of Rowbotham’s rebellious six, was undaunted, filling Liberty with his thoughts on Proudhon and Kropotkin. ‘They had all turned their ...”

“... play (aged 79) was still waving the same handkerchief. Better I suppose than always hailing a new dawn. 19 October. Back from Yorkshire on a Saturday for a change. We’re used to repairs on the line on a Sunday but today they’re so widespread that nobody at Leeds seems clear about the best way to get to London, one desk suggesting via Sheffield, another ...”