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“... What is an urban legend? First of all, it is not the 20th-century, metropolitan version of Greek and Roman myth. The villains and heroes of the so-called urban legends are not the inner-city heirs of Persephone or Theseus. Rather, the urban legend (more accurately, the apocryphal story) is one of those amazing tales which has been the recent experience of a friend of a friend ...”

“... of two and lived with a succession of relatives; at the age of five he went to boarding-school. Robert McCrum calculates that ‘in total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15.’ After he left Dulwich College, to which he remained deeply attached for the rest of his life, his father got him a job at the Hong ...”

“... of Granta, suggested that it would be more accurate to say there was a ‘lull’. Since, then, Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer, has discussed the question more than once in his column, ‘The World of Books’. And in a recent issue of the Guardian, Stephen Moss, that paper’s former literary editor, has asked: ‘Why do ...”

“... Whatever the women in these Weldon and Shuttle novels achieve, it is not through effort or desperation so much as by passive submission. Women’s minds and bodies are the scene of all the action, but apparently no more than the scene; and though uninhibited freedom in this area is a sign of emancipation in modern women’s writing, I don’t know that the effect and the message in these two books will get a welcome in radical circles ...”

“... a Kessing’s Archive entry: ‘it inflicted disaster and destruction on the city,’ we are told. Robert McCrum’s first thriller was unusually well received. Follow-ups are notoriously hazardous, but he will not lose many readers with this second effort. The hero of A Loss of Heart is a 30-year-old Polytechnic lecturer. (...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... fact that they are in cahoots doesn’t imply that they’re up to any shenanigans. Dolan quotes McCrum, Cran and MacNeil’s entry in The Story of English on the word: meaning ‘mischievous behaviour, trickery’ it ‘is first recorded in America in 1855 and comes from the Irish sionnachuighim, meaning “I play the fox, I play tricks.” Or does it? One ...”