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“... a dream, and they could still keep alive, if in the past conditional, that promise of happiness. George Sand reported to Flaubert that the younger people she knew were dismayed by the book: ‘They didn’t recognise themselves in it, they who haven’t yet lived. But they have illusions, and they say: Why does this man, so good, so loveable, so gay, so ...”

“... her.’ Unawed, the couple make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It ...”

“... careful, non-intrusive touch of the directors (Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and Shall We Dance and George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan ...”

“... both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon dioxide – the same protocol Al Gore as Vice-President had ...”

“... and teenage daughter spend a wonderful few weeks on their own together, reading Balzac, Zola, George Sand – ‘“All essential in their so various ways,” my mother told me firmly’ – and eating takeaway from the traiteur. Then comes the time to snuggle up for ‘lucidity, clarifications’: ‘There was much to chew over,’ Bedford ...”

“... Lorca, or the moody flotsam that he watches bobbing up on the tideline of the estuarial Tagus (‘sand,/Atlantic Ocean, condoms, sand’ – all right, that’s Lowell), it barely matters. The absence of thesis, agenda, pointer, lesson is exhilarating. The author wastes no time justifying himself or excoriating the ...”

“... the world-class biographies written in English over the past fifty years – Leon Edel’s James, George Painter’s Proust, Michael Holroyd’s Strachey and Shaw, Richard Ellmann’s Joyce and Wilde, John Richardson’s Picasso, Maynard Solomon’s Mozart, Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and Russell, Hermione Lee’s Woolf, Judith Thurman’s Dinesen and Colette ...”

“... She calculated the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand’, pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death. She was interested in death, and particularly in its willingness to oblige, she had survived a suicide attempt in 1953, she was touched by the silence of the ...”

“... George Lucas is the most money-successful film-maker there has ever been. Of the eight films he has directed or produced (he eludes the conventional Hollywood division of labour), Star Wars and The empire strikes back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse ...”

“... brave attempt at a taxing subject. The opening pages of A Trick of the Light give us Wyn Douglas, George Grillet, and London. Douglas, marginal urban man, a fixer, a reporter, an intriguer, scurries about the underside of the city with plans for the dispossessed. George Grillet, 25, Anglo-French, vacationing in England ...”

“... of its femininity as are the many versions of it in fiction today. Indeed, together with George Eliot, once thought of as a masculine talent, it is Charlotte Brontë who laid down today’s guidelines, drawing continual attention to the female presence in the centre of the book, though both would have balked at saying, as Fay Weldon has done, that ...”

“... he had briefly considered becoming an actor. He was taken by the 80-year-old music hall performer George Robey, and the way he went about his work. ‘I used to admire him – going out alone in front of a hostile crowd, not disguising his contempt for the audience, and beating them every time. Wearing the resistance of his medium down, like drawing, in a ...”

“... end to their journey. ‘There was great joy to see the land,’ the Baptist preacher David George recalled. ‘The high mountain, at some distance . . . appeared like a cloud to us.’ They had retched and ached through seven weeks of storms and pernicious fevers at sea. Now they raised three cheers and fired a salute. Their British officers ...”

“... traveller’s perspective to a fictional analysis of England and Englishness. His main character, George Grey, is English through and through, from his taste in shirts (Jermyn Street, handmade ‘in a faded, denimy sort of blue’, with his name sewn into the collars ‘like a school boy’), to his taste in food (Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney puddings, heated ...”

“... long way out, turning Morecambe Bay into an extraordinarily impressive and dramatic expanse of sand, sky and distant water, which can look exuberantly Mediterranean in good weather and loweringly, oppressively Nordic when under cloud. The same phenomena turn the Bay, as seen from Bardsea, into a perfect horrorshow for agoraphobics, and I’m afraid that in ...”