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“... the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself. This book is a great feat. Andrew Boyle went through archives and memoirs in two continents, but above all persuaded people to talk – people in ...”

“... Butters’s The Triumph of Vulcan (1996), which includes a photograph of the English sculptor Stephen Cox (born 1946), stripped to the waist, caressing the smooth flanks of the quarry on Mons Porphyrites. Cox was the first person since antiquity to obtain porphyry from this source, and a huge chunk of it, partly worked by him and partly by Roman quarry ...”

“... as the heartland of hiphop, belt buckles were used for bragging and branding. Everyone wore them, Stephen Witt writes in How Music Got Free, at the CD pressing plant in North Carolina that handled heavyweight hiphop labels such as Def Jam, Interscope and Death Row. ‘The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys ...”

“... Stephen Kotkin​ ’s Stalin is all paradox. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic; a gambler, but cautious; undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an omnivorous reader whose success in getting the Russian creative intelligentsia into line was ‘uncanny ...”

“... her recently remarried father die, and to confront Wanda Fay, his obnoxious wife. Toward this young woman (a ‘ball of fluff’, as Helen McNeil calls her in a fine introduction to the novel, but hard as nails) Eudora Welty shows an unexpected hatred. The ‘scored and grimy’ breadboard Laurel rescues as she prepares to leave the ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... The coup​ is almost funny, if you squint. The year was 1954, and the CIA, still young and enthusiastic, had decided to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Washington was convinced that the tiny republic was a threat, a reflection of growing anti-communist paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations ...”

“... gab and gags, with men slagging their mothers-in-law and keening to ride (or ‘roide’) brassy young girls. That’s the way Doyle’s men think of women and that’s the way his women think of men and that’s the kind of writer he is. No one writing fiction is better than Doyle at uncovering life inside council houses and getting at the buzz on ...”

“... career is one of the great success stories of Late Victorian letters. In 1871 he was an obscure young architect’s assistant who had just published a barely passable novel, Desperate Remedies. By 1873, on the appearance of A Pair of Blue Eyes, he was enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and ...”

“... of fortune to do with Lydia’s dwindling supply of money, sexual assaults suffered by two young women she and Luca befriend, a murder, a miscarriage, and fatal or near fatal injuries to members of their party while they’re crossing the Sonoran Desert into Arizona.Cummins maintains a balance of terror and treacle by constantly describing the ...”

“... decades; I stopped for a while when I was an untenured professor, and when our children were very young, but I missed it more each year. My wife knows all about it, though I don’t dress as a woman when we’re at home; I do wear nail polish, and girly rings or bracelets, and feminine colours (last month she gave me, and I cherish, a spectacular violet ...”

“... warned that ‘people, including politicians of all parties, are worried by the failure of many young people now to engage with the institutions of the free society they live in.’ Denied access to the pieties of Our Island Story, a generation of misguided eco-protesters and climate-camp activists might find themselves on the wrong island, at Kingsnorth ...”

“... if it was less preposterous than I used to think. Surely it must be good that in sad Uganda young people are carefully reading Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’, and Animal Farm, and Dickens, and the angry recent books of East African writers – Okot’p Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood? Surely this reinforcement of ...”

“... in his own engaging style, something of a prima donna. Ironically, it was while he was still a young man that Hartley wrote the nouvelle that is in many ways his masterpiece, the one which most perfectly balanced the art of speaking out by not speaking out. Simonetta Perkins is a gem of almost miraculous accomplishment and maturity, despite its obvious ...”

“... to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the ...”