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“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) illuminated much, but not the movement’s origins. Now David Stevenson can claim to have clarified these considerably, in a work of creative scholarship flavoured by exceptional candour and gusto. His subtitle gives his gist. In the 17th century, such characteristic features of Freemasonry as the local ...”

“... the judges – in Durham in the bishop’s palace; in Cambridge in the Trinity College Master’s lodge, where in Lord Adrian’s first term the less than lovable Mr Justice Melford Stevenson returned for lunch on the first assize day and placed his decomposing wig on the stand in the entrance hall. Lady Adrian came upon it and threw it in the bin. One of the ...”

“... launched a fleet of biographies, editions and collections of his letters over the last century. David Brown’s fine Life is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations: his inconsistent ego, his contradictions, his Waspy waspishness. It deals with his reserve and self-consciousness, his reluctance to risk failure, his unconvincing ...”

“... feel, cannot be far from the Epiphany. And, in fact, for some decades now (from Walter Allen to David Lodge) critics have found it worth while to see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ in terms of the new movement of Modernism. Certainly it does no harm to recall that Kipling’s story was written nearly two decades before the so much more apparently modern Ulysses ...”

“... As they make their way home from the docks where they work to the cramped room where they lodge, they trespass inadvertently on the children’s territory and, oblivious, keep ‘talking’ to each other, chased by the children – who pull faces, mocking and baiting them. Together looks unflinchingly at London’s postwar harshness and poverty, and ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... the cheque with Mr Trood and made the familiar journey by train and cab to Peckham. At Windsor Lodge he gave Nelly her housekeeping money. Sometime after this he collapsed. Nelly, with the help of her maids, of the good-natured caretaker of the church opposite – sworn to secrecy – and of a hackney cabman, got the unconscious man into a big two-horse ...”

“... into the nether regions is frequently heroic and, in achieving it, he is ennobled but emasculated. David Goodis is the laureate of this mood. William Kennedy, a more recent mythologist of hobo as artist, has seen his novel Ironweed make it all the way to the screen, where Jack Nicholson was obliged to continue his career-long impersonation of the damaged but ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... fifty or more camps scattered around the country (with an undetermined number at large), trying to lodge asylum claims or waiting for an opportunity to take a smuggling route into Western Europe. Conditions in the camps are often dire: overcrowded and with poor sanitary conditions. Despite unprecedented funding, mainly from the EU (an investigation for the ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... out in Nab Wood, his ‘first intimation of the numinous’ (quite near the spot where Sir Oliver Lodge photographed fairies), Aunt would be close at hand, in helmet-hat and nigger-brown costume, to make sure Michael did not fall down a rabbit-hole, while Aunt, muttering Yorkshire gibberish, searched for magical comfrey. Later, as an Army officer lost in the ...”

“... the public bought him the Haigs’ ancestral home at Bemersyde. But Monty, though qualifying to lodge in a schloss here and a château there, had nowhere in Britain to lie up, save in a War Office flat in Westminster or his own caravan parked at a school. His letter to Buckingham Palace angling for a modest grace-and-favour house was ill received. ‘The ...”