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“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... by Goubert in the first instance as ‘of the British type’, was sometimes attached to the town hall as proof of the ‘democratisation of water’, but it was as a centre of social life – and of gossip – that it made its way from politics into literature. In Zola’s L’Assommoir there is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing ...”

“... all show and not much business. Early on, we’re often told, they were the constant butt of music-hall comedians (something to do, this, with George Robey who was apparently on Chelsea’s books once, as an amateur). There was even a popular ditty – ‘The day Chelsea went and won the Cup’ – which was taken to encapsulate the club’s special brand of ...”

“... anti-malaria teams of making their roofs fall down by the use of DDT. Ensued incredulity, as Sir Richard Burton would say. The roofs were made of attap (palm fronds), and there was an attap-devouring caterpillar that dwelt in the roof. In normal conditions a parasitic wasp preyed on these pests and kept their numbers down, but the wasps were highly sensitive ...”

“... said that a lodge, a drive and a ‘Keep Out’ sign was an invitation to trespass.)Hall Barn is of course atypical of Wiltshire’s 20th-century buildings. It is one of a small and variegated group that are exceptions to the dismal norm. Two of the best have been demolished: the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer ...”

“... so perhaps this was the kind of secret that people in Dublin were happy to know. After I read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce in my twenties, I asked my mother about Eileen. She knew quite a lot about her mother’s friend. The Joyce family had lived locally for some years. Eileen had a flat in Mountjoy Square, where she stayed during the week, and ...”

“... One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology – an introspective examination of the subjective character ...”

“... Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-hall, and then for 18 years as general director. The high point of Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather lesser era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter ...”

“... plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots bartering sex for a ring. To quote Julie Christie, who would know: ‘They exist to be disliked by the heroes.’How, then, to make sense ...”

“... minor characters in British literature who appear as workers, usually larger than life, like music hall artistes. Dickens, of course, could see the public entertainer in just about anybody, but he was unusual in making people expressive of their jobs, and his novels display a panorama of the gainfully employed. In his fiction, there are twelve merchants and ...”

“... martyr of Khartoum, I left the pier and its deserted wine bars and found my way to the Old Town Hall: the political and civic centre. The big attraction was an exhibition of paintings by Duncan Grant: ‘Duncan Grant, Gravesend Artist’, that is, not the Bloomsbury wildboy. A pulsating view, down High Street and the Heritage Quarter to the Thames, having ...”

“... his La Boutique fantasque brought André Derain’s designs to the Coliseum, then a music hall. The story of two cancan dolls who elope from a Victorian toyshop, it provided a satirical view of 19th-century mores, its human characters more like ironic cartoons and its dancing toys – Massine and Lopokova – strangely sinister as well as ...”