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“... continually disappointed in one another. Nellie had begun her Bloomsbury career as cook for Roger Fry from about 1912. His house, ‘Durbins’, in Surrey was to his own design, a variation on the Arts and Crafts answer to the Kensington terrace, with a garden by Gertrude Jekyll and a bird bath by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Its ground plan had social as ...”

“... Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and, during a brief period when she moved on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry. Butts registers their comments, advice and obiter dicta. (Plans have now been announced for a published edition of the diaries, the most important unpublished memoir of the period that I have seen.) In 1918 Butts noted: ‘What we want is a new way of ...”

“... To explain exactly what the author was up to would be equivalent to identifying the murderer of Roger Ackroyd. Honour will be satisfied if he indicates in the most general terms the sort of thing the novelist might be attempting and makes a few knowing comments about particular devices or references that he thinks he has penetrated. Thus it comes about that ...”

“... well established by the early 18th century. Addison and Steele had their loveable curmudgeon Sir Roger de Coverley harrumph that he would be a better customer if Vauxhall offered more nightingales and fewer strumpets. A Virginian gentleman called William Byrd was matter of fact about the amenities in June 1718: We went to Spring Gardens where we picked up ...”

“... that required armed intervention. The stories told by the griots praised the kings for the wells they had dug and the food they distributed after poor harvests. The 17th-century Timbuktu chronicles tell us that they encouraged markets, organised workers and backed improvements to rice cultivation introduced by Jewish farmers near Timbuktu. My textbooks ...”

“... But the neighbouring streets still provide the decor of deprivation for photographers such as Roger Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the ...”

“... of children’s literature seemed unassailable. The latest adventures of John, Susan, Titty and Roger could safely be placed in the hands of the most impressionable child, and placed they were by wholesome parents every Christmas holidays between 1930 and 1943: Swallows and Amazons, Coot Club, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, every one a bestseller to be ...”

“... unbreathable. But he kept up – by letter – with his old Fabian intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord ...”

“... in Nothing if not Critical (1990), he deplores the neglect of English art, blaming (among others) Roger Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another ...”

“... communist. I hadn’t known that this was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to ...”

“... about his decades-long sexual harassment, degradation and exploitation of his female employees, Roger Ailes became Trump’s debate coach, though they soon fell out – some reports said Ailes was frustrated by Trump’s inability to concentrate. The Fox anchor Andrea Tantaros claimed that under Ailes, Fox was ‘a sex-fuelled, Playboy Mansion-like ...”

“... Cromwellian recalls Flora’s efforts to organise the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm. When H.G. Wells got her into his flat, clearly planning to assault her, Matheson realised that it would be ‘sheer folly, not to say fatal’ to panic or scream, so she simply laughed at him ‘and by the end he had become ruefully avuncular.’ The BBC may have been ...”

“... all here on borrowed time, waiting for the penny to drop. Shah set up groups and organisations and Roger, our small daughter and I often spent a Saturday or Sunday first in his house in a leafy village not too far from London and then at Langton House near Tunbridge Wells, another suburb of perfect respectability. The house ...”

“... parrying acute hunger (lotus berries, mustard shoots, radish leaves) and extreme thirst (streams, wells and rainwater tanks). On the eighth day, he wrote, ‘I was consumed with thirst and I had no water at all.’ He searched a ruined village for a tank of rainwater but had no luck. Further along the road he came upon a well with a rope but ‘no vessel on ...”

“... of the conflict, but by the time Anthony Fletcher has guided us round the counties of England, and Roger Howell round the towns, we must wonder whether any generalisations about local allegiances can ever be made again. Donald Pennington describes the burdens and the dislocation brought by the fighting, Robert Ashton the scant respect shown by Parliament for ...”