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“... born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson calls his book ‘an intellectual biography’ and ignores the man altogether, as if the politician’s ideas can be cut clean away from the rest of his life. Strachey started out at the beginning of the century in a well-to-do Liberal ...”

“... shot Tony five times, killing him instantly.An investigation was launched and in February 1993 Noel Thompson, a taxi driver who had driven Tony to the house a few days before his death, and admitted tipping off the IRA, was convicted of conspiracy to murder. ‘Obviously others were involved,’ a detective from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the ...”

“... as one motive. Her best-known novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow, was based on the Thompson and Bywaters case, in which Edith Thompson was hanged with her lover for the murder of her husband. The book was published in 1934; it is an expansive, romantic novel, full of dresses and decor, which tells its story ...”

“... some time ago. This is one of the ways in which Inglis’s book unexpectedly resembles Our Age, Noel Annan’s group portrait of the post-1945 great and good: new characters are introduced with a splashy description; rankings matter (so and so was the best sociologist of the time); there are frequent hints that the author knows the people being ...”

“... public interest. Such a display of professional modesty speaks for a different time; similarly, Noel Annan’s model of a tightly related British intellectual aristocracy driving the national culture, and Edward Shils’s celebration of postwar Britain as a haven for intellectuals (‘Outside the China of the Mandarins, no great society has ever had a body ...”

“... on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about valuable ...”

“... un-) disguised portraits of people he’d met and stories he’d been told. (Sadie Thompson, an American call-girl, appeared – name, fat legs and all – in the short story ‘Rain’.) It was a habit which left a ‘trail of angry people’. Maugham was born in 1874 in Paris, the youngest of four boys, to an English solicitor who looked ...”

“... the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”

“... there might be more to this story than appears is suggested by a puzzling absence: the name of Noel Annan, fellow and later Provost of King’s, a close friend, does not figure in it. If in principle such matters have their place in an autobiography, they are of slight moment otherwise. The main burden of Hobsbawm’s treatment of these years is ...”

“... in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was ...”

“... interests them isn’t the rood loft or the pews carved and dated 1641. They are on the trail of Thompson, the woodworker of Kilburn who always carved a mouse on his handiwork. Some of the pews are his, done in the Forties or Fifties, so somewhere here will be a mouse and they scuffle along the pews looking for it. Rather a silly quest, I ...”

“... often in soak on the draining board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’. 21 February. On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ...”