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“... One for My Baby, then, Parsons does not pretend to originality, or even attempt to reposition the brand; nor does he opt for any great subtlety of meaning. Both novels are a bitter lament for the long lost nuclear family, the respectable surburban, lower-middle-class family life, the family, as Alfie puts it, ‘that I knew in my childhood, a family that ...”

“... the halo of hush around beauty. McBride is closer in her aesthetic to Jack Butler Yeats than to William, with her preference for smudges and streaks, abrupt smears of language, her avoidance of the sort of brush-stroke that vanishes, its job done, into the likeness of the thing represented. Her prose has a tactile, built-up texture, so perhaps what she ...”

“... what kinds of appeal they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brand new Home Intelligence Department, within the fairly new Ministry of Information (or propaganda), to find out. It was headed by Mary Adams, one of British television’s earliest producers, before TV was shut down for the duration of the war: she moved to ...”

“... come apart in a welter of recrimination and relapse. AA survives by virtue of its peculiar brand of communism. There are no dues, it will not accept bequests. Meetings are self-supporting: usually you put a dollar in the basket – this is the seventh tradition. Any money surplus to immediate requirements (typically, the hire of a dusty church hall, an ...”

“... the companies, it pays to start early. Market research suggests that children often recognise a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. Much child-directed advertising aims to turn kids into fifth columnists within their families, nagging their parents to the checkout. The marketing guru James U. McNeal, in his 1992 book Kids as ...”

“... his students, Jean Coutts (Rowe confirms the well-known story that he sent her a note enclosing a brand-new lady’s handkerchief, asking if it was hers). By early 1941 he was working in MI14, the intelligence section attached to the War Office ‘which dealt with Germany, the German armies of occupation and the profiling of senior German officers’. Rowe ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being lavish of his professions of ...”

“... over Vietnam be revenged. Thus it was only a matter of time before the crepuscular world of William Casey was exposed to view. ‘Affair’ is too bland a word for the Iran-Contra connection. Remember that it involved the use of skimmed profits from one outrageous policy – hostage-trading with Iran – to finance another: the illegal and aggressive ...”

“... who worries about the homeless and the hopeless in our inner cities; who found Thatcher’s brand of conservatism to be lacking in humanity; who writes letters which on occasion show real insight and depth of feeling; and who works assiduously in the discharge of his public duties. Thus described, he is probably the most civilised and sympathetic member ...”

“... and ‘Hamiltonised’, as Keith Lehrer puts it, by the respectable but inferior philosopher Sir William Hamilton. In the second place, he suffered greatly in the collapse of the great tradition of Scottish philosophy, caused principally by an influx of scholars from south of the border. In the third place and fourth place, it may be noted that, although he ...”

“... The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no breaking out of the ...”

“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”

“... Road, a narrow two-lane road, one side of it lined with dripping trees. On the other was a brand-new development of large houses, built close together on tiny lots and ornamented with minuscule front lawns and comically topiaried shrubs. Almost at once, we passed a street-sign for Crabtree Avenue. We continued along the narrow road, looking for a spot ...”