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“... Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among the most prominent of them – Steinbeck could not accommodate himself to the academic grid and grind.’ Were Parini to describe Steinbeck pissing, doubtless we should be told that Shakespeare and Milton were also in the habit of passing water ...”

“... That is why her characters stay in fancy hotels, despite the dismal fates that accompany room service. In hotels, the Didion heroine, like Alice, falls down the rabbit hole into numb lawlessness, an ‘outland’ condition (recall Tom Outland in Willa Cather’s A Professor’s House). In literature, it is more delightful to lose a self than to gain ...”

“... in which he recounted a Tunbridge Wells childhood, a youthful infatuation with France, war-time service in the Army and an early career teaching English in postwar France as a way of financing time spent in the Archives Nationales and countless provincial depositories. The episodes recounted in The End of the Line further illuminate a trajectory already ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... first of a series of compromises with the arrival in 1957 of Network Three, a hobbies-and-study service that was given 40 per cent of the Third’s hours and sought to widen the audience by courting every minority from jazz-fanciers to motoring nuts. It was instantly nicknamed ‘the fretwork network’, a sobriquet more gruesomely applicable to today’s ...”

“... and rum to the British colony of Sierra Leone. A former slave trader, Benson now worked in the service of abolition, and his concern about the wet goods was not simply for his own fortune; he also worried for the cause of ‘legitimate commerce’, one of two key concepts at the heart of Bronwen Everill’s incisive history of political economy and ...”

“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... It looked more like a postcolonial bureaucracy than anything else; there were three tiers of lunch service at its Moorgate headquarters, and executives would greet the afternoon with sherry and martinis. Authority flowed according to a ‘matrix structure’, where each operating unit answered to two layers of supervisors: the executives responsible for their ...”

“... especially the one on the Rigi. Whereas the English had at first tended to monopolise hostelry service, demanding full-scale banquets late at night, tyrannising hosts and abusing servants, all the nations of Europe now competed. At least the imperious English had forced hoteliers to brush up on hygiene and instal water closets. Serious climbers, who ...”

“... 17th-century euphemism for a post at the Court flesh market. Even among the beauties recruited to service the Royal Family, government officials and the aristocracy, Sarah and her elder sister Frances were notable. In 1673, when she was 13, she joined the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She ...”

“... Scott had acquired the Manchester Guardian in 1907 and henceforth it was ‘carried on as a public service and not for profit’. After his death, and with the Manchester Evening News to sustain its revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... was an intellectual, a classicist, an able linguist and a pillar of the 19th-century Indian Civil Service. So a governess, a top-notch preparatory school, Winchester and Christ Church were as much a matter of course for Cecil as Gladstone Elementary School in Cardiff was for Hugh. They did, however, share an adolescent ambition to work in newspapers, though ...”

“... has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written after his arrival in India in December 1942. There are also short stories, among the best of the Second World War, and there are the letters. The letters have had a following since a small selection was included in ...”

“... a number of novels; columnist or leader-writer for half of the nation’s press, with a record of service from the Sketch to the Spectator; champion of family values; political counsellor at Downing Street: the editor of the Times Literary Supplement seems the ideal candidate for the task in hand. Nor is the success of The British Constitution Now in ...”