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“... lover Laurie Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely uncultured,’ her lover Alix Strachey explained. In the end, alongside HD, Sayers and ...”

“... and laudable pastimes’. It all sounds rather Calvinistic. For all the concrete detail, there’s no place like Utopia. More weaves that joke into the book’s title. Ou topos is ‘not a place’ (but compare eu topos, ‘good place’); in Republic Plato contrasted his utopia avant la lettre, ‘Kallipolis’, the beautiful or fine city, with a banausic ...”

“... as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their dictionary should be ‘no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout’, an ambition that meant there could be no relying on Johnson, or cribbing the work of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, their main rival in the world of ...”

“... faiths is forcibly intruding itself on the religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and ...”

“... but also possesses the improvisatory variety and boldness of birdsong. He was probably no more licentious in his English than the perpetually rule-breaking Dickens, even if not up to Dickens’s cool overall command of long episodes of linguistic disruption. Gash calls this passage from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour a piece of ‘straight visual ...”

“... the principles on which he made his choices. All letters to Virginia Woolf are included, which was no doubt to be expected, though they are the only ones in the book that aren’t really worth reading, for they are mostly love letters, and the love letters of this stern and unillusioned figure are as likely as anybody else’s to decline immediately after the ...”

“... for the virtues of swimming, paring his toenails as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and quadricycles were heavy going. A fetching illustration by George Cruikshank, dated 1819, shows two young women, each mounted on a ...”

“... as a result of the worldwide protest that ‘was fired by Bruemmer’s images of the cute pups’. No doubt the concept of cuteness as a criterion for recruiting people to the minority who believe that other creatures have a right to survival on this planet is nauseous to the committed, but if you are involved in green propaganda you have to be flexible and ...”

“... Castle of Otranto is more widely read than the Collected Speeches. Why? Could it be ... No, we won’t go that far. The very suggestion would automatically be labelled slander by the Soviet press. Anyway, it is to the Western reader that this diary is addressed: the author’s forehead is far too tender to try to break through the Iron Curtain. Some ...”

“... British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered sensibility that has put cooks in front of ...”

“... her retirement in ‘a house with many shutters, Venetian blinds and lace curtains so that no one will ever see me and everyone will know my time is done.’ To be a great tart you have to invent yourself, just as Rothschild invented the Baron Philippe, and if you have sufficient aplomb, other people will accept your creation. Milady Vine goes up like ...”

“... up out of the blue to hog the television show you were already feeling nervous about. There is no sense of comeuppance on these occasions, only a view of scuttled dignity, and life getting out of hand. What is enjoyable about the tightrope is not the feat of someone’s walking it or the threat that they might fall, but the possibility of a comic ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... knees wouldn’t bend very much. While my classmates sank deeply, I merely bobbed a bit, dropping no more than a couple of inches. And without a proper plié your centre was all over the place, your leaps had no lift and when you did get off the ground, you landed heavily. That wasn’t, however, as much of a problem as it ...”

“... two opposing drives: the desire to be taken seriously and the desire to be popular, and so it is no surprise that one has served as a vehicle for the other since the American 19th century. English-language detective fiction began with Poe’s pulpy stories of Auguste Dupin, and was definitively sanctified 50 years later by Chesterton, who assimilated the ...”