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“... martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other works are mere rhetoric … His one great hatred was of dullness, which is very dangerous and can raise a whole nation in its defence.’ Ford Madox Ford, in an article written in 1939, agreed about Wilde’s essential harmlessness, but viewed his ...”

“... of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. So far so good. But if poverty is promoted from a platitude to a problem, things become much more difficult. For the problems of poverty are simple yet complex: what is poverty? And what is ...”

“... Henry McLeish had to step down after a scandal over the subletting of his constituency office; Jack McConnell resigned after Salmond defeated him in the 2007 election. His successor, Wendy Alexander, the sister of the current shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, and a protégée of Dewar’s, was the intelligent moderniser the party needed. But she ...”

“... the over-exposure of his wares in Hollywood’s window. Zane Grey was born in 1872 as ‘Pearl Gray’ – a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a town founded by and named after his ...”

“... Babysitter’ are a married couple going out to an evening party, their children, the babysitter, Jack (her boyfriend) and Jack’s buddy Mark. There is no single authoritative story-line, though some readers might claim that it is possible to deduce one. In a series of discontinuous paragraphs Coover cross-cuts between the ...”

“... Z. is an easy, tall man, with flat long shoes, very clever fair sized hands and smooth, straight gray hair, very quiet hair, rather old fashioned.’ Meanwhile her programme of reading, though partly prescribed by the college, bore the marks of individuality as well as an interest in fashion: Pater, Sappho, Stevenson, Thackeray, Whistler, ‘a book on ...”

“... a British citizen and joined up without delay. His letters slip into American spellings – ‘gray flannels’ – but are also exemplars of British understatement, and peppered with English schoolboy slang: ‘awfully’, ‘topping’, ‘top hole’. He was born in San Francisco on 2 August 1897; his parents were Josephine Harker Fernald and Chester ...”

“... in the world, including four first Folios, and important holograph manuscripts by Swift, Pope, Gray, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Blake, Burns, Shelley, Lamb, Charlotte Brontë and Dickens. Amis is hardly the only 20th-century writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom ...”

“... cried the restive Prince, “where can she be? and why this infidel delay when she cares not a jack about me” ’). A totally conscientious editor, Patricia Willis lets no sparrow fall to the ground. One is impressed by the sheer volume of the reviews, done over a very long period, as editor of the Dial, and after that for every sort of periodical up to ...”

“... relatively short-lived. In 1928 Carstairs commissioned an exorbitantly expensive speedboat, the Jack Stripes, which she hoped to race across the Atlantic at 50-60 mph. (As Summerscale reminds us, setting speed and distance records on land, air and water was a kind of international mania in the Twenties; Carstairs was undoubtedly inspired in part by ...”

“... visited us occasionally in Dundee, a better-looking and more powerful man than his older brother Jack, my grandfather, and projecting a sense of confidence and certainty. Although there was an Indian restaurant in Broughty Ferry my parents never ate there or ordered in and, when Robin visited, my mother cooked the lamb curry she’d learned to make, along ...”

“... attentive to matter, and to bodies. Even a mid-century poet as noted for attenuated melancholy as Gray deals with bodies and matter, whether the bodies are becoming undifferentiated earthy matter as in the ‘Elegy’ or (more cheerfully) are playing about Eton College and running in the uttering wind. In general, most 18th-century poetry until near the very ...”

“... number of musicals, but how many musicals are great films? Or, speaking of moments, the killing of Jack Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... estimate of the size of the German bomber force in the west was much too high – Peter Gray Lucas refers to this as the ‘St Ives story’ (‘As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives’). But to get a better estimate it was necessary to know which aircraft belonged to which unit, which was difficult because the call-signs ...”