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“... model is L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Like Hartley’s narrator, Leo, Frayn’s protagonist, Stephen Wheatley, is tormented by a schoolboy code prohibiting sneaking, blubbing and emotional expression in general. Leo is bullied by ‘Jenkins and Strode’, Stephen by ‘Hanning and Neale’. Both boys worship the family ...”

“... throw episodes you would rather have forgotten. But the Profumo case, which should be called the Stephen Ward case, will not go down. The longer it is around, the uglier it gets. It is a shocking story, which will continue to discredit its participants, all the more so for as long as they pretend, like Lord Denning, that there was no injustice perpetrated ...”

“... When the silvery powder is brushed away, we can see exactly what you fingered; a textured print of small circles, like suckers on an octopus tentacle, softly formicate under our ...”

“... and torts. This was the analysis put forward by the criminal lawyer and jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, who was retained by the Jamaica Committee in its endeavour to get Eyre and some of his officers convicted. Its attraction as a workable constitutional theory in a common law polity was instantly recognised by Bagehot and by the end of the century had ...”

“... Fifty-eight years ago the man we now know as Sir David McNee was born in dire poverty in a Glasgow tenement. His father was a railwayman, and a staunch tradeunionist who rose ‘through a variety of jobs’ to be driver of many famous trains, including the ‘Royal Scot’. His mother was the daughter of a railwayman. In this book Sir David reports how he has often had occasion to refer with pride to these facts in later life, in face of suggestions that, as Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, he had no real insight into the problems of working-class life with which that office so often brought him into contact: ‘the lessons learned in Glasgow streets and tenements ...”

“... the only Englishman there. I remember interviewing the American director Nicholas Ray in his small hotel room – he began the interview by sweeping his dressing table clear of all his pill bottles – and I remember a meeting in a cinema in Paris. Renoir was there, bald-headed and wearing a mac, and Truffaut and Simone Signoret with Pierre Prévert, the ...”

“... my age … it will be the more prudent course … to use my remaining strength in studying small special points.’ These were chiefly botanical and contributed to his last major publication, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Published in 1881 shortly before his death, it was one of ...”

“... his lively voice took me by surprise. We were of the same generation: he was 37, I was 30. ‘Hey Stephen, how are you these days? You know it’s really getting very tense here in Ouaga. I think you should come, it’s urgent, don’t hang around.’ These were not his exact words. But the contrived levity, the hint of imminent danger and the discreet appeal ...”

“... In the concluding essay of an adventurous collection, Stephen Jay Gould observes that most ‘classic stories’ in science are wrong. There are good reasons why he is right. In their reconstruction of the past, practising scientists have been apt to celebrate the insight of those who anticipated their own ideas, tacitly dismissing those who were blind to where the future would lie ...”

“... was a lot more to him than one-liners and limericks; and if one thing emerges from the thickets of Stephen Lloyd’s excessively long biography, it is that Lambert had one of the finest musical minds of his generation and a critical faculty second to almost none. During his lifetime, you would have come across him as a conductor, either at the Vic-Wells ...”

“... arrival: told that a cottage lies empty by the River Avon, I’ve come down from London in a small furniture van. My companion is the playwright Heathcote Williams; he’s just completed the play which excites the Sixties, AC/DC – and he’s brought as luggage a large radio and no more. He’s promised to help unload two beds, a table and some ...”

“... is the last thing he proposed to himself in his Bloemfontein adolescence, reading Joyce and taking Stephen Daedalus’s intention to fly by the nets of nationality, language and religion as a guide. He is too ambitious to be content with becoming a second-rate writer (which is what the poems included tactfully indicate), and settles for a Civil Service career ...”

“... brazen music to poems that might well be described as miniatures. Her poems tended toward the small in regard both to subject-manner (birds, bushes, mosses, babies) and duration. Of the 96 lyrics assembled in her new Selected Poems, only seven run to two pages; none extends to three or more. She seems by temperament to have been a direct soul. Her poems ...”

“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... his ever looking around or looking away when we were talking, except to light another of the small cheroots to which he was addicted. And the quality of his attention was remarkable: incidental details and chance remarks dropped away, and suddenly you found yourself confronting something at the centre of your life. Or rather, the chance remarks you made ...”