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“... view. However, every truthful diary (even from such sturdy fellows as Edmund Wilson or Sir Peter Hall) shows up the writer in a ludicrous light, all the little manias and depressions exposed. Carrie is as Pooterish as her husband. Much of her time is devoted to plotting against him, devising schemes for moving the family away from boring Holloway to good old ...”

“... little rich boy if ever there was one – in a prominent grazing family. His mother, the imperial Ruth, could have been scripted by Noel Coward. Attaining widowhood, she left to spend her last quarter-century in the London which had always been the Mecca of her late-colonial class; until then, from World War One to 1937, she was a leader of Sydney ...”

“... of 1877, he spotted a potential model, Margaret Benson, at a concert rehearsal in the Albert Hall and arranged for an introduction. ‘She has often been called my “Burne-Jones daughter”,’ the obliging Mrs Benson told him. Though the critics were generally appreciative when The Golden Stairs was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, they ...”

“... out of place, Adam decided, belonging to daytime, like the smell of Turkish cigarettes in the hall after breakfast, or kedgeree.’ But apart from this sort of poetic awareness, which Salaman shares with the children, the novel shows both children and adults to be prone to self-induced fear and the exercise of cruelty. The relationships in the family are ...”

“... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...”

“... over the entire early modern period, without any dramatic turning-points or sharp discontinuities. Ruth Perry knows these things; she warns us not to confuse her argument with ‘the discredited thesis that the multi-generational, extended family gave way sometime in the 17th or 18th century to a nuclear family form’. She does maintain, however, that the ...”

“... in being written by an author susceptible to the glamour in ill-fated associations. Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell’s alter ego, has written her second enthralling novel: A Fatal Inversion is about the fatal convergence of some more or less unlikeable young people, during the sweltering summer of 1976. The novel opens, in the present, with an episode involving ...”

“... hence-forth seemingly confined to his choice of socks. At Wellington he starts walking out with Ruth Bowman, ‘a 16-year-old schoolgirl and regular borrower from the library’. This period of Larkin’s life is quite touching and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith ...”

“... estates. Others tried to cling on. The Earl of Powis stuck bravely by his decaying home, Lymore Hall in Montgomery until, at a church fête in 1921, ‘without any audible premonitory symptoms’, the earl and twenty of his guests suddenly fell through the floor of the great hall into the cellar. After that, sale was ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in some best-selling ...”

“... as a musty mid-century artefact, an image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the ...”

“... should all just leave,’ he said to members of his audience. ‘Not just leave the hall, leave our country … I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man. I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man … We should send them all back.’ Among those troubled by Clapton’s remarks was the photographer ...”

“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los ...”

“... zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats with giant feathers. Ruth Carter, the costume designer for the movie, interviewed in By Any Means Necessary, says she had six suits for Malcolm but neither she nor Lee wanted the audience to start thinking: ‘Where’s he getting all these clothes from?’ I confess this thought did ...”

“... 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 ...”