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“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... and relaxed into a lifelong partnership, explaining: ‘I lean more and more on her trousers.’ Claire Harman has written a bright and freshly-expressed biography, which is full of interesting data. Characteristically, she excavates the facts of Warner’s early life, but does not labour their sapphic significance. Nor did Sylvia Townsend Warner. When her ...”

“... in the home he had chosen for them, and his frustrations grew dark. Recently, when the actor Matt Smith was introduced to Prince William and the prince was told Smith would soon be playing his grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The Crown, William offered only one word. ‘Legend,’ he said, as if they were talking ...”

“... by literary hostesses from her first appearance in print onward, and described by Naomi Royde-Smith in terms equally applicable to a patent corkscrew, ‘welcome at any dinner table, invaluable at weekends’. There is nothing golden about the talk quoted in this biography and the charm she exerted over certain friends and admirers remains mysterious and ...”

“... life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of ...”

“... that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the ...”

“... Two years ago​ a woman from Dewsbury called Claire Skipper, suffering from toothache, went into her garden shed, clamped the offending tooth in a pair of pliers, and pulled. Her tooth broke. There had been no vacancies at her local NHS practice and she couldn’t afford private care or the journey to the nearest emergency clinic in Bradford ...”

“... director of the Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox, a former LM contributor and younger sister of Claire Fox, the IoI’s head honcho. (‘Various people have brought allegations about my past involvement in politics to the attention of my current and former employers,’ FF said when I asked her about this. ‘At every stage my employers have robustly ...”

“... have made numerous bad leadership appointments in the last twenty years (think of Iain Duncan Smith), but have corrected them once the pragmatic question of electoral success entered the equation. That pressure pushes the party towards the swing voter of the centre ground, the ‘Mondeo Man’ or ‘Worcester Woman’ fetishised by party pollsters in the ...”

“... like the idea of working on Shabbat.’ Instead, he went to train as a typewriter engineer with Smith Corona in Osnaburgh Street, then worked for a dealer with premises near Liverpool Street Station. After that he was employed by various other typewriter dealers: ‘The last one was in Camden Town, but then I got ill, and when I came back they didn’t want ...”

“... moment, the more directly it reflects present day concerns, as when Herr Levin invokes Adam Smith in arguing for free trade among European nations. Hans remarks that ‘Smith’s theories are capable of enriching a state and impoverishing its workers’: Before free trade I think other measures are needed, such as ...”

“... a small fortune from her husband, whose business had been making gloves. Acker’s mother, Claire, became pregnant at the age of 21, only to be abandoned by the baby’s father; whereupon it looks as though Florence did a deal with a man called Albert (Bud) Alexander, that by becoming Claire’s husband and the ...”

“... of everything else).The most significant book published to mark Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now ...”

“... appreciative exclamation at the success of the character of the Branghtons’ tenant Mr Smith, who speaks of himself as ‘a man who wishes to have things a little genteel’. Johnson was delighted by this ‘Holbourn Beau’: ‘such a fine varnish of low politeness! – such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’ Mrs Thrale claimed to recognise just ...”

“... brought to his mind a restless marmoset, Dorothy Tutin’s Ophelia ‘a mouse on the rack’ and Claire Bloom’s Jessica in an Old Vic Merchant of Venice, gazing adoringly but disconcertingly into Lorenzo’s eyes, ‘a sea-lion awaiting a fish’. He almost resented actors such as Gielgud, whose movement had no animal quality for him to catch. Like film ...”