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“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”

“... superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London ...”

“... main functions would be to pool information about flour. Participants shared sightings of plain white flour in local shops or online suppliers with the secretive thrill of foragers who’ve just discovered a patch of wild garlic or chanterelles. When one neighbour managed to get hold of some, it would be portioned up and distributed or bartered for other ...”

“... work had let go earlier. He began the ‘Russian Nights’ enterprise on the crest of a wave. The White Hotel (1981) catapulted him to international fame. It was a novelist’s fairy-tale: ignored or ridiculed as high-falutin’ pornography in the UK, Thomas’s Freudian fantasia sold only a few hundred and seemed destined for oblivion. But it was ...”

“... Now another guide enters and, propping herself, kneels by me with a small bowl. She removes a white lotion (baby cream?) and then starts to massage (I see, the medium is the massage) my hand. At first I am unresilient, but then begin to ply her hand with the lotion. Couples begin putting the stuff on hands, arms and faces to feel and touch. We are inside ...”

“... with curled pink and bronze petals, in a little silver-plated vase. We sat holding large white menu-cards folded down the middle, and glanced around at the other diners. The room was warm, busy and quiet. We were delighted. Steadily, and without the slightest straining for effect, the picture is built up. The last sentence frames it off with just a ...”

“... in a rosy halo, and Nathanael at the opposite side, staring through his glass. She wore a plain white silky dress, which the light filled with pink flares and sanguine folds.’ And here is Humphry Wellwood’s production of The Winter’s Tale, staged at one of the Fabian summer camps: ‘There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl ...”

“... quite as strong as our sense of jubilation, of ‘a giant step for mankind’. Further, as Peter and Leni Gillman suggest (prosaically or poetically), ‘Space Oddity’ sounds like an experience of shooting heroin, and they sternly quote another Bowie lyric: Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, We know Major Tom’s a junkie. Anyway, Major Tom helped to ...”

“... And he is forever boasting of his polished Euro-know-how, his multilingual communication skills. Peter Shreeve, who preceded David Pleat, was probably the sort of manager he would have wished Terry Venables to be, or to become: It was this reference to the French that was to produce a curious postscript. Peter Shreeve had ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her own way, the inflated and overheated ...”

“... Her name was Sophie Catchprice. She had bell-bottomed jeans and long blonde hair like Mary in Peter Paul and Mary. She had bare feet and chipped red nail-polish on her toenails. She stood at the door of her bedroom one Saturday afternoon and saw her husband sucking her younger son’s penis. What’s admirable here is that Carey manages not only to shock ...”

“... John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according ...”

“... it: his inability to chat, his coarse red hair, which he ceased to hate only when it turned into a white mane. In a Scots word, he was crabbit – which shares that fricative ‘cr-’ with so many kindred words: crusty, cross-grained, crag, craggy, crozzley, crooked. Wainwright wrote and drew himself onto his pages with an unequalled completeness and an ...”

“... personality of the hero in the manner of other series of mystery novels – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Travis McGee et al. The Francis pattern is more like an obsession: the hero suffers great physical pain and humiliation at the hands of a villain who is often so well liked, powerful and respected that no one but the hero can believe in ...”