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“... There​ is no entry for Michael Field in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women whose identities were entangled in various forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise ...”

“... I’d never seen one; few people in Britain had. I was offered a place in a car travelling from Bristol and eagerly accepted. My bird-listing years, long dreamed of, were about to begin. The four of us spread out along the bank at Breydon between 20 other observers and stared at the mud. I was schooled in the awful disappointment of the ‘dip’: the ...”

“... you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can amaze students ...”

“... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...”

“... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...”

“... embrace of the polluting Silvertown Tunnel – positioned the Greens as London’s third party; in Bristol they attracted substantial parts of the city’s left-wing vote and now have the same number of council seats as Labour. Bristol West is a tempting prospect for the next general election. In Scotland, Green MSPs will ...”

“... to East Indians? What would happen to the hundreds of thousands of British subjects in Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow whose livelihoods depended on sugar?It wasn’t lost on West Indians that many leading abolitionists had significant investments in the East India Company and that any swing to the canefields of Bengal would enormously enrich their ...”

“... than the picture did or could. Elsewhere, labels like ‘The Bronx, New York’, ‘Restaurant in Bristol’, ‘Long Hospital Corridor’ are not evocations of places or meanings, they are empty gestures to what is not there on the page. With Harrison’s Collected Poems, the works are their own movies, so to speak, complete entities in their own right and ...”

“... Deborah Nadoolman Landis, is herself a celebrated Hollywood designer (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and now a professor of design history at UCLA; the show consists of some pieces of her own, and many others from Debbie Reynolds’s collection, recently sold – she had pioneered salvaging costumes from studio wardrobes. Landis has ...”

“... and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and ...”

“... In November​ 1981 at a function in London, Neville Butler, a professor of paediatric medicine at Bristol University, contrived to drop a cup of coffee at Margaret Thatcher’s feet. He stooped down to mop it up, then sprang up and asked her for money. ‘I’m Professor Butler,’ he’s reported to have said. ‘We’re doing a national study looking at thousands of children ...”

“... onto the shadowy screen that is called ‘Disraeli’ by loyal Tories in Winchester and Watford, Bristol and Bolton remains one of the few genuinely intriguing features of the modern British political vocabulary. A politician who could deploy verbal advantage as a form of life, whose grasp on the non-linguistic world was virtually non-existent, whose grip on ...”

“... sacking them. We crept away, licked our wounds and determined never to forget. Halfway through Michael Crick’s magnificently rigorous biography of Jeffrey Archer, he deals with the story of the Toronto suits. All the main characters are here again – George Wool, Larry Park, Doug Hunt – all repeating what they’d been told about the man called Archer ...”

“... my friends, I mean my close friends. Then he made matters worse by saying he had had a talk with Michael (Heseltine). ‘He is formidable.’ ‘He’, pause, ‘is’, pause, ‘formidable’. I got him back to the station at four thirty, smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”