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“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”

“... as in the apparently gigantic goitre of St Francis in St Francis and the Birds of 1935. Kenneth Pople, who writes throughout only just this side of idolatry, is never at a loss to explain such obscurities, very often referring them back to Cookham and its people. It is ‘not unreasonable to suppose’, he says, that St Francis represents Pa as he ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... least its main cities – had been engulfed in an ‘epidemic of suicide’, especially among the young. In the 1880s, educated opinion, always ready to blame any malaise on the government, saw the supposed suicide epidemic as a social pathology – ‘degeneration’ was the word most often used. Newspapers gave generous coverage to suicides, and Dostoevsky ...”

“... Ministry of Defence’s Training Area and so is now the playground of those upright and blameless young men recently corrupted by the shameless women of Catterick. 15 February. The train from Leeds comes to a halt somewhere outside Wakefield, where it waits for ten minutes. Then, when we have got going again, there is a crash from the front of the train as if ...”

“... that she wavered for some time between writing a personal memoir of her 16 years with her husband Kenneth and embarking on a full-dress biography, embracing the 36 before they met. As she foresaw, making the second choice has produced an odd, hybrid book, not quite one thing nor the other. At times deeply intimate, at others coolly dispassionate, her ...”

“... audiences howling into their tumblers for years. To someone like me who grew up thinking Kenneth Williams was the perfect English gentleman (and imagining Russell Harty and Lily Savage to be the perfect Northern blokes), the words of Norman Tebbit are not just mad in the way you’d expect from him, but also profoundly at odds with something ...”

“... children and go into schools have been astonishingly foolish. We thought that others listening to Kenneth Baker’s pronouncements as they tumbled out before, during and after the election would be bound to doubt his wisdom and good faith. We thought that other people would laugh, too, at his picture of all those classrooms in ‘loony left’ boroughs where ...”

“... it may be simply that he has had more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to produce two absurdities, the first comic in the form of ...”

“... run-of-the-mill story it’s attached to. Childhood itself is a golden age, if we’re to believe Kenneth Grahame, who used this nostalgic phrase for the title of his first children’s book, and an equally romantic one, Dream Days, for its sequel. Carpenter is not insensitive to the irritating orotundity of Grahame’s prose (and what can we make of an ...”

“... of Poetry in 1931, Zukofsky put them together, along with Williams, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth and a stylistically random collection of others (including the young Whittaker Chambers), under the rubric of ‘Objectivists’. His manifesto in the issue was called ‘Sincerity and Objectification: With ...”

“... It sometimes happens that an exceptionally talented person dies rather young, leaving behind him friends, still in their prime, who happen to be good writers – witness the posthumous celebrations of Shelley and D.H. Lawrence. Mark Boxer was famous at Cambridge; he was even famous for the manner of his leaving it; and then, without serious intermission, he became and remained famous in London ...”

“... the first word on the subject, in the nature of things it could scarcely be the last. By contrast, Kenneth Rose’s superb biography will surely stand as the best and most interesting study of George V that we are ever likely to get. There is much greater understanding by the author of his subject, and the public and private lives are brought together with ...”

“... off a kind of Ready-brek glow, the aura of the consciously high-minded. I remember talking to a young Spaniard heading home after a spell in Sudan. A couple of sheets to the wind, he joked about the reception he expected. ‘You know, in Spain, I’m a saint.’ With his dark beard and gaunt profile – amoebic dysentery, or a giardiasis, perhaps? – he ...”

“... of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David (Young) ... I went to Brooks’s, lost £150 and my appetite waned. Returned here and ate a toasted bun, first food since a banana at 1.30. In the tea room I had a chat with Fallon, a nice cool whip. I complained about all this rotten, irrelevant, unnecessary ...”