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“... on. Too much politeness, and mutual wariness. And what a comedy in contrasting physiques: Forster sharp, quizzical and birdlike; Hartley plump, vacant, moustached and apologetic, half walrus and half melting snowman, pipe in mouth. But underneath they had a great deal in common, and chiefly the mysterious, almost unconscious knowledge of their own powers as ...”

“... as noteworthy as Greene. For all of which the first part of the book tells a good story and casts sharp sidelights on the mythology of the Blitz, to which the writers were not always inclined to subscribe. Macaulay’s article for Time and Tide describing one raid as ‘a sample corner of total war’ barely made it into print. Censors had requested that ...”

“... not occurred, the dinosaurs might still be here. Under the influence of palaeontologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, the notion of progressive evolution has given way to a more makeshift world view, in which circumstances play as great a part as natural selection in shaping the history of life. In this view, chance happenings and sudden disasters may have ...”

“... frequently in this century’s war novels, but, as Kermode says, it has seldom been given such a sharp definition. A young man issues from the university with a set of serviceable, enlightened and easily acquired opinions and attitudes; in the Thirties they would have been pink and pacifist ... His modest achievements make sense in the context of a social ...”

“... Game’. His style too frequently has the ring he recognises in the sound of the word itself: ‘sharp, shrieky, cheap, belligerent, predatory’. He strains painfully for epigrams, like a copywriter working towards an advertising slogan, reassembling the available properties until they provide the setting for a mechanical flourish of rhetoric. The career of ...”

“... is usually acceptable only if it goes hand in hand with breeding (whence the popularity of Stephen Fry). Walcott does not fit the bill: he’s an outsider and an overreacher and his work betrays a definite lack of cool; it sparkles and it shines. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a 1936 recording of Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb and his ...”

“... as the heartland of hiphop, belt buckles were used for bragging and branding. Everyone wore them, Stephen Witt writes in How Music Got Free, at the CD pressing plant in North Carolina that handled heavyweight hiphop labels such as Def Jam, Interscope and Death Row. ‘The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys ...”

“... your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s; in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters; writing in the evenings; rosaries in the early hours. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his ...”

“... of the state over which central government had no immediate control, continued to attract the sharp eye of the law, provoking the celebrated denunciation by the House of Lords of the surcharged Poplar councillors (with their ‘eccentric principles of socialist philanthropy’ and ‘feminist ambition to secure the equality of the sexes in the matter of ...”

“... functioning of democratic polities – a process of which the Pergau Dam decision can stand as a sharp recent illustration. The historian’s conclusion may well be that the last three decades of the 20th century have seen a judicial refashioning, with sufficient popular support to mute political opposition, of our organic constitution. If so, its ...”

“... all’, ‘determined’, ‘vague’, ‘hope’, ‘somehow’. ‘He berated her with knife-sharp words that actually made her stop in her tracks’ could go in an anthology of bad writing: the ponderous verb at the beginning and the platitude at the end, the hapless adjective and misused adverb in between. One longs for something with real fear, real ...”

“... appear more decorative than radical. The shock of the new is hard to feel at a distance, but as Stephen Walsh observes, we expect the music of the modernist generation, of whom Debussy was the first, to be difficult, abstruse, even rebarbative. The works of Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Bartók continue to present us with a residue of toughness. By ...”

“... hear them? Francis? – Yeah. That was all. I knew he wouldn’t say any more. We listened to the sharp mumbles coming up from downstairs. We did, not just me. We listened for a long time. The silences were worst, waiting for it to start again, or louder. A door sort of slammed; the back door – I heard the glass shake. – Francis? – What? – That’s ...”

“... tries to speed Britain into joining the ‘newly submerging countries’ it is useful to have so sharp and yet so complicit a description of our vulnerability. Radji records only one person who refused his hospitality: Philip Roth (though there were others). The title is apt. Radji was indeed ‘in the service’ of a narcissistic and obsessive monarch, a ...”

“... and indefatigable networking helped. At the age of 22, he was described as ‘gentle of manner and sharp of intellect, easy-going and amiable in conversation’. He made his way in royal government at a time when there was little distinction between politics, bureaucracy and diplomacy, and like all literate men in royal service, he had been educated in ...”