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“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... period and the identity of characters in the new section – it was 1926, it turned out, and ‘Lord Valance’ was not the Lord Valance of the last section. Even a man’s apparently demented cries of ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ were misleading, since he was merely shouting at a dog of that name. These alienation effects ...”

“... by her dreadful father – that ‘gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man’, as Virginia Woolf would call him – who had long since run through the £20, 000 lottery prize Mary had won as a child. Dr Mitford continued to batten on his daughter and she continued to be pressed for money, but the small cottage they shared at Three Mile Cross had become ...”

“... national psychodrama, and that they tend to be a displacement activity. It echoes the loftiness of Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, with its whiff of paternalism; the ‘always’ implies the BBC’s permanence in the pantheon of British institutions.The BBC continues to rank alongside the NHS in the national imaginary, and is still the ...”

“... for the company of popular female novelists), and they had many friends in common: the Sitwells, Lord Berners, Rex Whistler, T.E. Lawrence. Yet they didn’t meet until they were approaching their forties, and no friendship came of it. Partly this was because they were both conscious of Alfred’s excommunication from the family, which had relegated ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... à la page with the intrigues of various society women, as well as sanguine that the prodigal Lord Arthur will turn out well. As he puts it with airy relish, ‘Bon sang ne peut mentir.’ (In fact, Arthur goes pitiably to the bad, and becomes, against expectation, one of the book’s few touching characters.) A more drastic betrayal is delivered by ...”

“... was often ‘outrageously childish’, deliberately provocative in company, and inclined to lord it over her servants. Widowhood meant life on her own terms. She grew ‘nostalgic and insular’, sour about income tax and the Labour government. Not nostalgic enough, though, to pick over old memories with prying journalists and fans. She never traded on ...”

“... when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady deigned to acknowledge the other.) And not long ago I met an elderly female couple – two very elegant Syrian women – who had lived for many years in Paris on the rue Jacob, across from the house in ...”

“... impossible to disagree. (If you were trying to put Christie in the modernist camp with Stein and Woolf and Joyce you would have to argue that her interest in the traditional apparatus of character and narrative was so perfunctory that she was in effect signalling that it didn’t matter and was present purely as a formal requirement – a claim that I think ...”

“... in the light of future events, entirely appropriate. In the novel, Aldous Raeburn – the future Lord Maxwell – is a true-blue Tory and a champion of the 1890s game laws. Handsome, well-bred and aristocratic, he falls in love with Marcella, a young Fabian. ‘I come fresh into your country life,’ she tells Aldous, ‘and the first thing that strikes me ...”

“... some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ...”

“... picture with his pointer, half-obscuring the image with his amusing conceits on it. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘Mr Forster has been apt to pervade his books like a careful hostess who is anxious to introduce, to explain, to warn her guests of a step here, of a draught there.’ From one or two remarks in his diaries, it seems Forster regretted his own ...”

“... his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’), Churchill (1874-1965, ‘prime ...”

“... been asked to apply.) The talk had to do with the war and writers of the 1920s – Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, the Sitwells. I showed slides of Claud Lovat Fraser’s sad little trench-drawings and expressed, all too dotingly, my love for them. I even mentioned (obliquely) Uncle Newton. It was not a success. The department Medusa – a steely Queer Theorist in ...”