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“... and Napoleonic high collars, he exposed the collar bones in a chalice of roses, he carved tall elm wood prostheses like medieval caskets for the paralympic champion Aimee Mullins and, most famously, scooped the back of a dress or a pair of trousers to disclose the soft involution of the buttocks and what he saw as nature’s own line of beauty, the curve of ...”

“... sustained his rather dutiful-sounding devotion to his swami – in a shrewd preface to the diaries Christopher Hitchens speaks of Isherwood’s ‘amazing willingness to put up with the swami’ – which seems to have replicated something of his irritated devotion to his family, while the relationship with Bachardy became his true ‘means of ...”

“... 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’. He himself felt anomalous in the 1920s, and by the decade’s end ...”

“... parties. He was, he told his mother as he broke the news by post, ‘incredibly happy – touch wood’. But the newlyweds soon agreed that they were ‘sexually incompatible’, and Lois took on a managerial role in his life. Hamilton went back to visiting prostitutes while drunk. Further reasons to hit the bottle soon presented themselves, finding their ...”

“... of a perpetual motion machine, working independently of electricity, oil, water or coal, made of wood by an Albanian shepherd. Describing Herbert’s marriage to Mary Vesey, at which the bride had the support of 14 adult bridesmaids, all daughters of peers, she resists any temptation to say that it must have been funny as well as vulgar. It seems we could ...”

“... was they who secured its posthumous publication, when, after numerous rejections all round London, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, to his enormous credit, acquired it for Hamish Hamilton, who published it, with Fowles’s introduction, in 1981. It grieves me that I wasn’t aware of its publication at the time, because surely I would have loved it then as I ...”

“... and during that time he published The Orators (1932), The Dance of Death (1933) and, with Christopher Isherwood, The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), as well as writing most of the poems which were to appear in Look, Stanger (1936). It was the period of the great outpouring of his talent, and, as this first volume of his collected Prose reveals, much of ...”

“... rot. My car barrelled along streets lined with rubbish, through an architectural jumble of slatted wood, rough concrete, padlocked steel doors; then climbed past anonymous compounds ringed with razor wire, around dirt bends where derelict-looking houses loomed above the road on iron stilts. By the time I reached my hotel, six hours after landing, the 18th ...”

“... be alive. Preference here must mean something stronger than the will, or choice, or even love. Christopher Butler has pointed out that the term literally means ‘putting first’, so Proust may be insisting on a technical difference, which would reduce a little what seems to be the grotesque selfishness of the remark. There are also other elements in the ...”

“... The names of the actors appear briefly on a dark screen. We hear the sound of a car on a road. A title reads: ‘This film is based on a true story.’ Then we see a large American car from the back, driving at night on the wrong, that is, on the left side of the road. The car swerves into the right lane, the camera stays in the left, catches up, comes alongside the car ...”

“... inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose’. He makes a memorable entrance as Stephen Savage in Christopher Isherwood’s thinly fictionalised novel Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering loudly, contriving to trip over the edge of the carpet – an immensely tall, shambling boy of 19, with a great scarlet poppy-face, wild ...”

“... was needed, suppressing the contrary opinion of Goldsmith and of the FCO legal adviser Michael Wood. A month later Straw stopped Goldsmith giving advice (Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, told the inquiry that ‘it would have been better’ if Goldsmith’s advice had been obtained earlier). Further meetings took place, without records being kept. In ...”

“... with a grand staircase on the right ascending to the balcony. Wall lights brightened the dark wood panelling of the lower walls and made the gold flecks on the upper walls sparkle. To the right of the upstairs foyer was the café, its windows looking over Main Street through the central tower. On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the ...”

“... remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at ...”

“... was correcting their existing taste rather than banning a writer they had not yet encountered. Christopher Hilliard’s English as a Vocation shows that applicants to Downing were expected already to have read large swathes of Shakespeare, 17th-century poetry, Romantic poetry and 19th-century fiction. Hilliard has dug up not only the entrance exams that ...”