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“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... Civil War, mostly a much more accessible work, assumes that its readers will find the MP Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in November 1640 ‘too well known to need quoting’. Any prospect of a rounded or balanced discussion of the ‘fall of the British monarchies’ is jettisoned by the decision to omit themes which have been or are being ...”

“... and the Thatcherites were troubled by the ongoing costs of a fortified, garrisoned Ulster. Peter Brooke, who became Northern Ireland secretary in 1989, initiated the tortuously slow pavane that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with a speech in November 1990 in which he announced that ‘the British government has no selfish strategic or economic ...”

“... and Joyce, say, through Henry Green and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs and Christine Brooke-Rose. The dust jacket flaps of novels published by Calder and Boyars between 1966 and 1972 list their books under the varying heads of ‘Contemporary Fiction’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Modern Fiction’; unusually, on the jacket flap of Quin’s Tripticks ...”

“... of us outgrow too well; the madness of adolescence, ‘just a face we are going through’, as John Lennon once said; the madness of love, where the only sanity would be a proper respect for our folly and an attempt not to do harm; autism; schizophrenia; depression; and our failure to find any sanity in our hunger for money (‘money gives people an ...”

“... derelict cottages. Local opposition, orchestrated by the future Conservative home secretary, Henry Brooke, was fierce. Goldfinger – assisted by such influential neighbours as Roland Penrose, Flora Robson and Julian Huxley – successfully defended his design, citing its kinship to the formal articulation and clarity of the Georgian terrace. ‘Only the ...”

“... turns. In Paris, this might have been expected. There, the ‘irritated clowns’, in Christine Brooke-Rose’s happy phrase, the new ‘artists and philosophers of the meaningless’, have gone so far as to celebrate the arbitrariness of all reality and the reality of all arbitrariness. Former Marxists, like the anthropologist Godelier, now say that ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America ...”

“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... of Sir William Loraine. Brown’s father had been Loraine’s land agent and his elder brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... greyhound breeder, pioneering aviator, nationalist warmonger and proto-Fascist demagogue (‘the John the Baptist of Fascism’, as an early, Mussolini-sponsored biography styled him), he was certainly an all-rounder, and perhaps one shouldn’t complain if mild-mannered wallflower is not also on the list. ‘You must make your own life, as you make a work ...”

“... Hopper missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming group of heroes, mumbling geniuses ...”