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“... My problems began​ in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show ...”

“... and methods of selection.’ This makes perfect sense. Sutherland, in collaboration with Stephen Sharp, has performed an immense service in shifting historical attention from the Board of Education to local education authorities, where the most important decisions on testing were made. But the problem of the dissemination of ideas about inherent ...”

“... Stephen Spender was a visitor to the city of Hamburg both before the war and after, when he played a part in the work of occupation and recovery. He was well on his way to being the noted ex-communist poet, whose lyricism of the left spoke up in praise of pylons and the landing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs, ‘more beautiful and soft than any moth ...”

“... it survived its infancy largely thanks to Bernard Shaw’s reputation and money, that Clifford Sharp, the editor, was an alcoholic and possibly a spy, and that the paper itself was deadly dull. The only previous extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... never at a loss for a Cup Final ticket. He was married to Bessie, who banged the gong for dinner. Stephen Smith, my grandfather, was in on the café venture with his brother and also had shops in New Brighton (hardware, glass). Stephen was a sidesman at the Baptist church. No TV was allowed on Sundays, except for Songs of ...”

“... at a restaurant of her choice. Or sending Proust flowers. No. A volume of this sort is simply a sharp nudge in the direction of the grave; and that is a road, God knows, along which he needs no nudging. And why now in particular? Apparently he is 60, but when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being 60; he has made a profession of it. Like Lady ...”

“... But Bagehot’s sound account of the organic nature of the constitution stood and stands in sharp contrast to Dicey’s iconic reverence for the arrangements he chose to see and describe. Leaving aside his xenophobic and counterfactual insistence that Britain, unlike France, had no body of administrative law, Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary ...”

“... dump in which (it is implied) mere heterosexuals are content to fret and rot from crib to coffin. Stephen Adams does not propose a general or ‘encompassing’ thesis. Having insisted that methods and messages are diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and ...”

“... which suggests the energy of personal ambition, doesn’t quite fit. Though he was ever the sharp-eyed attorney, it was his grasp of minutiae, his gift with a pen, his ability to persuade others, his patience, that really marked him out. He had an instinct for the right move to make at the right time, offering a masterclass in the softly, softly ...”

“... neat chronology in which one account supplants the other. We cannot even chronicle a succession of sharp encounters, clear-eyed recognitions that there was a conflict that needed to be adjudicated. The positions, patiently reconstructed and carefully traced through a bewildering range of major and minor figures, swirl about, occasionally clashing but often ...”

“... to her authoritative biography of Shostakovich, published in 2000, Laurel Fay sounds a sharp warning about the historical value of personal reminiscences: Fascinating and useful as these can be, memoirs furnish a treacherous resource to the historian. Reminiscences can be self-serving, vengeful, and distorted by faulty memory, selective ...”

“... dinner. ‘Everybody is either a genius or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in some way. Poor Miss Stephen says is there nobody commonplace?’ Poor Miss Stephen – Milly, Leslie Stephen’s timid sister – had a point. Soon they met Leslie ...”

“... grating playfulness: ‘Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardour of perpetual anticipations.’ Stephen Millhauser, for all his novel’s faults, is dazzlingly gifted, not just in the richly sensual precision and wit of his writing (the ‘hot blue bulb’ of the silver camera flash Edwin’s father brings him, ‘so that he can press his fingernails into ...”

“... The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me ...”