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“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. In a public lavatory in Hyde Park, he picks up, in a quite different sense, an elderly man ...”

“... Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime ...”

“... of Oz: A Parable on Populism’ (1964), Henry Littlefield, a high-school teacher, interpreted L. Frank Baum’s novel as an extended metaphor for American politics in the 1890s. He argued that Baum, who in 1888 moved to the territory that became South Dakota, sympathised with the plight of the region’s farmers and was influenced by the views of a man he ...”

“... in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed the National Gallery of Art. The increasingly difficult and radical character of modern art may have further reinforced these preferences. And ...”

“... toward Robert intensified when his little brother Lewis died in infancy. A third son, Frank, was born in 1912, too young to be a playmate for the lonely Robert, though they became companions as adults.* Isolated from other children at an early age, Robert developed keen intellectual abilities while his social skills remained stunted.That became ...”

“... Travelodge because they’re ‘pet-friendly’ – on this walk we were accompanied by our Jack Russell instead of my usual black dog. Child and dog slept heavily, but I scrunched up by the small window, smoking illegally and staring out to the northwest where the sodium-lit realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In ...”

“... him), there could be no question of their living together so long as her ghastly husband, the Rev. Frank Besant, was still alive. Born poor, Bradlaugh never lost his sympathy for the poor classes he came from. His father was a solicitor’s clerk, his mother a nurse, and he left school at the age of 11 to work as a wharf clerk in a coal merchant’s. Never ...”

“... offer examples of Prince’s borrowings from the Criterion, but viewed from this angle the Pope of Russell Square himself comes to resemble the all-powerful patron whom the aspirant artist is skilfully wooing by ingesting and recasting his doctrines and preferred idioms. Memoirs in Oxford is also frank – too ...”

“... her mistress. But when she smelt those suitcases with the familiar scents, little Mini, the Jack Russell bitch, nearly went mad with joy and had almost forcibly to be removed from the room.’ Hailsham the private man, son, husband, even father of the egregious Douglas, is very lovable, so much so that the Hogg of the two ...”

“... seem plausible. Novels that deal with the breakdown of language (Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies; Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker) aren’t usually so concerned with realism. When Anna flies to Santiago – Doc has been airlifted to a hospital there – the details seem authentic enough for us to assume that if McGregor hasn’t been through something ...”

“... himself at the offices of the Atlantic, where he met the man who had accepted his poems, James Russell Lowell. Lowell questioned Howells closely to ensure that the poems were really his, then welcomed him warmly. He gave Howells a letter of introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who passed him on to Emerson and Thoreau with a note that announced: ‘I find ...”

“... the wall which I’m currently engaged on, is to be able to visit Cornelissen’s shop in Great Russell Street, which sells all manner of paints and colours and where I go this morning in order to find some varnish to seal the surface of the plaster. After I’d finished putting on all the greenish-yellow colour yesterday I did some trial patches of varnish ...”

“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add up, we ...”