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“... Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine ...”

“... see them reproduced in a study of Balthus’s work.Alice shows a woman precariously posed with one foot raised on a chair, carefully combing her hair, careless of a breast that has escaped from her shift and of her genital area visible below it. For Sabine Rewald, writing in the excellent catalogue of the 1984 exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... and passionate studies of economy, politics and culture by social historians as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I ...”

“... out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... of Sir William Loraine. Brown’s father had been Loraine’s land agent and his elder brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It ...”

“... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...”

“... memoranda rolls on which I spent most of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment about five foot in length and written on both sides. To turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, so it would sometimes look like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party struggling to put up wallpaper when all I was doing was ...”

“... the man whom he succeeds’. His decision to travel to Dublin shortly after his election to meet John Bruton reinforced the view that he was a Unionist of the new school. He has ‘briskly proved himself a true moderniser’, a Guardian leader concluded warmly. ‘The Molyneaux culture will seem extraordinarily remote and anachronistic.’ Word was ...”

“... and then, producing a shoehorn from her bosom, addressed Fyodor’s large, shy, poorly darned foot. Miraculously the foot entered, but having done so, went completely blind: the wiggling of toes inside had no effect on the exterior smoothness of the taut black leather. With phenomenal speed the salesgirl tied the lace ...”

“... or symbolic properties, metaphysical sensations: ‘Soft./Slight./Like light, like a child’s foot talcum-dusted and kissed, like stroke-reversing suede, like dust, like pins and needles, like a promise, like a curse, like seeds, like everything grained, plaited, linked or numbered, like everything nature-made and violent and quiet./It is all completely ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross ...”

“... in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”