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“... birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in ...”

“... This Booke,’ Leonard Digges claimed in a preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ‘When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke/Fresh to all Ages.’ If we take the First Folio as our biggest bibliographical landmark, the history of early modern print looks like a journey towards material permanence: towards the production of books that had the power to endure through time, and to ‘redeeme’ their authors ‘from thy Herse ...”

“... to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far wrong, either. What even Victorians regarded as Victoriana at its ...”

“... Queer this habit of mine of being garrulous. And I don’t mean that any eye but mine should read this. This is – really private. But I must say nothing affords me the same relief. What happens as a rule is, if I go on long enough I break through. Another habit is Dickens. She is always asking Murry to send a saving Boz novel she hasn’t yet ...”

“... put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will be long remembered and sadly missed not only by them but by the regiment and at the club. Always one for a joke, Stubby combined unswerving loyalty with a ...”

“... Hubertus Strughold’s Your Body Clock – ‘a book every intercontinental jet traveller must read’. You will learn in it how to minimise clock-shock on the way to Mars but not on the way to Mass. Though the book is dedicated to his wife, the only lunar periodicity that Dr Strughold can think of concerns female mosquitoes. A jetlaggard is not a ...”

“... and DJ-worship replaced the mid-century cult of the conductor. It’s possible, in other words, to read this period, from the mid-1990s to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, as one in which pre-existing popular or mass culture put in a claim to be considered the fundamental material out of which all art was – or should be – formed. To his ...”

“... studio with Yanko Varda, and became close friends with Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, all of whom spent time in Cassis during those years. Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to ...”

“... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the ...”

“... in the second. The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions ...”

“... Other changes seem to display a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr Laurence’s estimate of Shaw’s criticism of Brahms. In 1960 he quoted Shaw’s remark that ‘Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a ...”

“... copy about his escape from the Boers, the Siege of Sidney Street, or Gallipoli? Who could fail to read about all this with pleasure, except someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for ...”

“... man’s widow. The significant thing, though, is that Marrot’s generation (his book was widely read and instantly reprinted) retained a faith in the writer not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could ...”

“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.While Mansfield was alive, Woolf had found her ‘cheap and hard’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘utterly unscrupulous’. It bothered her that she wasn’t sure if Mansfield liked her – letters and invitations often went ...”