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“... historians in Canberra began to think about 1988 as a year offering a special opportunity to their craft. That year, we guessed, would inspire a larger and more general commemoration than Australians had organised at the end of any previous half-century. The coming occasion was sure to be more national than those others, for advances in central ...”

“... stack for coal-fired boilers to the golden galleon that caught the wind as a weathervane. This craft was a symbol of locality by which those staggering home from a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s self-confidence as a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its ...”

“... Of course you are.Auden’s openings, on the other hand, were launched against a flow. The craft itself felt watertight and shipshape, but its motions seemed unpredictable, it started in mid-pitch and wobbled:Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,On the wet road between the chafing grass ...    Between grass? What do you    mean? Where is ...”

“... milieu and the Parisian literary underground made familiar in the scholarly work of Robert Darnton. At a longer distance, the aim is to declare Gillray the blood brother of ‘tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, cobblers’. The scratched and stippled surface of an abandoned Gillray sketch is said to show his ‘unusual attempt to increase the ...”

“... The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of ...”

“... Writing Manufacturers’, Novak suggests that he was aware of the materials of the writer’s craft ‘as no other writer of his time’ – and Crusoe is here symbolically imaging those materials and that dogged deployment of technical skill. He is also brooding on Sedgemoor again, because after constructing the grindstone Crusoe kills three birds and ...”

“... writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained ...”

“... that any admiration he felt would be quite severely qualified. So with Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), one of the books we who were undergraduates in the 1930s were persuaded to read. Lubbock was a disciple of James and a strong point-of-view man. Forster treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been Forster’s boss in Egypt ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... and now began to write for publication – humorous essays and sketches at first, in the manner of Robert Benchley. ‘I dislike night life and clubs,’ he told a friend in a letter. He refused to push to the front of the line at fancy restaurants by telling the head waiter who he was. Ruth was put out by the show of intractability, which she rightly saw as ...”

“... feel rather miserable.’ The novels that followed were, if anything, even more teachable in their craft and cleverness: too gorgeous, too ingenious, I used to think sometimes, like the Fabergé eggs the count tempts Fevvers with in Nights at the Circus, until she hatches a train to engineer her escape (and, yes, I do suspect that’s why Carter mentioned the ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... MoD hadn’t puffed itself up in the first place. This is​ exactly what happened. When General Robert Fry, the MoD’s head of strategic planning, came up with Britain’s Afghanistan intervention plan in 2004, it was predicated on rapidly drawing down British forces in southern Iraq and shifting them to Helmand. Fry felt Britain had proved to the ...”