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“... attended a Royal Ballet summer school. Two years later he was admitted to its junior school, White Lodge, in Richmond Park. It’s an appropriately fairy-tale setting: deer are often visible from the ballet studio windows. Boys and girls who pass the exacting auditions, as Scarlett did, board at the school from the age of eleven and sleep in dormitories. Those ...”

“... and ‘marital break-ups’: why, the cover asks, ‘do so many husbands don an apron at the lodge when they wouldn’t be seen dead in one at home?’ British fears of Masonic conspiracy have never risen to the same pitch as on the Continent or in the United States, not least because our history lacks an adversarial Enlightenment and its culmination in ...”

“... then stowed in old newspaper for winter in cardboard boxes under our parents’ bed. Dad would lodge one apple in his pocket when he left early for his industrial unit. The rest were put to play: on Hallowe’en, the children of the house would bob for them (the apple being the prize). On Christmas Eve they wound their way into toes of ...”

“... other trappings of an upwardly-mobile prick.’ Marks was into St Katherine’s Dock years before David Mellor. Into the revamped wetlands before The Long Good Friday. But it was the same old cocktail: drugs, guns, Arabs, falcons. Flemingesque vulgarity: ‘Crême brûlée with Château d’Yquem made for a good dessert.’ The karma of cash. ‘It’s always ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so ...”

“... the World Out There, which he imagines in the form of a mansion in Hampstead called Bradbury Lodge, where celebrated writers meet to have a good laugh at his expense. Meanwhile he puts down his own hopelessness as a littérateur to his incompetence in the matter of Nature. It seems to him that all Eng Lit is really about country walks, so ‘what the ...”

“... movies and now the video footage. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was working on the life of David O. Selznick, the man who produced Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Duel in the Sun. It was a great help, yet a daunting obstacle, that Selznick had kept virtually every bit of paper that passed through his office. But the family archive had other ...”

“... the fact that instead of dying in the calm of his own family house a few miles away, he lay in the lodge of Woodstock Park, the scene of his sylvan debauchery, a kind of urbs in rure. What further confuses us in searching for the real Rochester is the recollection that he loved disguises and successfully passed himself off as tinker and as physician. The fact ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... to follow rutted, unmade, probably private roads through parched fields. (Betjeman said that a lodge, a drive and a ‘Keep Out’ sign was an invitation to trespass.)Hall Barn is of course atypical of Wiltshire’s 20th-century buildings. It is one of a small and variegated group that are exceptions to the dismal norm. Two of the best have been ...”

“... locked doors, with not even a sticker to identify them. Up the hill in Boglestone, the Orange Lodge looked just as it used to when I was a candidate: a low concrete bunker with bombproof grids over its windows. Nobody about. But this isn’t a ghost town. Greenock is struggling into recovery now. It is a place built for outward vision and hope, a big ...”

“... technique changed a great deal in the 20th century, at least in the English-speaking world. David Lodge argues in Consciousness in the Novel that a generation starting to publish in the shadow of modernist masterworks chose to emphasise externals rather than psychological depth, with characters whose spoken words were almost ostentatiously ...”

“... be referring to any one of several Dickens novels; in fact, we know that he must be talking about David Copperfield – the very classic that Holden Caulfield mocks in the opening sentence of Salinger’s book. Is it likely that a hard-pressed secondary school teacher in an Appalachian town in the late 20th century would assign his pupils a whole Dickens ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”