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“... the Observer and Washington Post. As a young man, he spent a year in the United States, where he read The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash’s classic study of the Dixie state of mind. The book made a profound impression. Almost three decades later, Sparks set out to write a similar psycho-history of his own country. The Mind of South Africa is an extremely ...”

“... Harry Truman and the Democrats and expected something for Israel in return. On the other hand, Leonard Garment, a lawyer hired by Israel for the Pollard case, knew which side of his dual loyalties was stronger when he hesitated over his clients’ demands concerning the wording of a legal document. He was asked: ‘What kind of a Jew are you?’ He ...”

“... confession illustrates ‘the compulsive nature of the entries’. No doubt one is forced to over-read these journals, or at any rate the earliest of them, to justify the trouble of copying and commenting on them. There are naturally a few moments when something out of the way, and usually disagreeable, is happening – for example, when members of the family ...”

“... whose swords are symbolic of pens, printing presses, pamphlets. It is perhaps difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer ...”

“... parents and faculty in Latin. Parents receive a plain copy of the text, which few of them can read. Most of the students can’t read it either. But they receive a different, annotated version. Footnotes, always written in Latin – ‘hic ridete’; ‘hic plaudite’ – identify in-jokes and references to local and ...”

“... put him quite out of court for those linguistic thinkers, the influential Leonard Bloomfield foremost among them, who had set a taboo on Distraction, intensive or otherwise, and saw language as the sum total of real or potential verbal utterances. Where Saussure worked by abstraction, to the hypothesis of linguistic structure, the ...”

“... Meanwhile Banting and Best were ready to attempt a clinical trial of their product on a boy (Leonard Thompson) at the Toronto General Hospital. One of the first people in England to benefit from insulin treatment was a young physician at King’s College Hospital, R.D. Lawrence, who survived to become England’s principal authority on diabetes. The ...”

“... a place in some literary equivalent of Wisden (‘the largest number of multi-volume histories read by a Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy ...”

“... with a dark circle on its edge where the wood had been rubbed smooth. Above it was a notice that read: ‘Please put nothing on the ancient sill. This was the prayer-desk of the anchorites for several centuries.’ I knelt in front of it. If the floor had been at the same height in the medieval period, the desk would have been too high for an anchorite to ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...”

“... business to prescribe what other people should have and what they should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the ...”

“... which Crosland himself would probably not have relished, a good way to see how wrong he was is to read the volume of essays which Messrs Lipsey and Leonard have dedicated to his memory. Not, it must be admitted, that they themselves concede anything of the sort. On the contrary, they have managed to turn their mentor ...”

“... from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after ...”

“... loses sight of man himself. On the evidence of this book, as of his best recent films, we can now read ‘and Françcois Truffaut’ in that sentence alongside ‘Jean ...”