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“... his satisfaction cannot be unalloyed. Whatever Happened to the Tories, a book he has written with Mark Garnett, is an account of how all this came about: how the party which recovered so quickly after the 1945 defeat almost disintegrated fifty years later. Although it is subtitled The Conservatives since 1945, this is not a conventional history. It is ...”

“... politician whose driving ambition was not focused simply on his own advancement. Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett capture the trajectory of a career that saw Joseph transformed from a run-of-the-mill Conservative minister of the second rank into a major figure in the ideological revolution that we know as Thatcherism. This is a solid and well-organised ...”

“... Women in Love as one might restore an old or damaged painting, stripping away accretions, Mark Kinkead-Weekes declares his intention ‘to remain true to the nature of The Rainbow, as the work of a continuously revising and re-creating author’. Alterations made between manuscript and first printed edition are usually retained unless they appear to ...”

“... beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... What an extraordinary, what a fatal, limitation you would say, in a novelist! And yet (it is the mark of the artist to make his limitations also serve his end) she succeeds in being one.’ That is true enough: what is not true is the implicit counter-claim that she was inventing a new form. The form of The Waves is a sham: it is simply her Diary by other ...”

“... Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. At least none of those 15 translators ...”

“... had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering his voice, and his role. He had decided to become a teacher. Auden taught full-time for five years, from 1930 to 1935, at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, not far from Glasgow, and at the Down’s School in ...”

“... Christian, communitarianism of Tawney and his descendants. The notions that made their mark on the magazine were more individualist, radical-liberal ones. Robin Cook’s personal credo is more obviously New Statesmanly than Blair’s: ‘what attracted me to the Labour Party was not the values of collectivism but the values of individualism, of ...”

“... sense of exhalation; instead of carefully loading a brush, like Sargent, and making just the right mark in layers of thick oil paint, she would sketch rough outlines and then fill in the shapes haphazardly. She suddenly saw the possibilities afforded by imaginative use of bright colour. Shadows could be green or blue; highlights orange or yellow or pink. In a ...”

“... Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many ...”

“... he is a great writer, not simply by virtue of what he dares, but by virtue of what he achieves. Mark Kinkead-Weekes’s biography, which covers the years 1912 to 1922, the years of The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), many major stories, the travel books, Twilight in Italy (1916) and Sea and Sardinia (1921), and just misses his superb book of nature ...”

“... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...”

“... to attend Régis Debray’s trial in Camiri as part of an effort to save his life. All this left a mark. But it was at the Berlin congress organised in January 1968 by the SDS, the left-wing German students, that I began to feel the need to join some organisation. Rudi Dutschke was there, the Wolf brothers with Ulrike Meinhof skulking in the background and ...”

“... to curious and indignant passersby.) I was in the middle of a WhatsApp exchange with Tobias Garnett, formerly the co-ordinator of XR’s legal strategy team (and a Trinity alumnus). ‘I guess part of the point,’ he messaged me from London a little ambivalently, ‘is to connect distant and abstract destruction to tangible things that you care ...”

“... Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable ...”