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“... A little over four years ago I joined the Labour Party. I was recruited on my doorstep by a member of the local branch, a quick, wiry, energetic man in his fifties who appeared just at the right moment. After a nomadic wandering across London from bedsit to bedsit, flatshare to flatshare, my cardboard boxes and suitcases eventually necessitating some form of transportation larger than a taxi, my wife and I had finally come to rest next door to a pub in North Southwark ...”

“... Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes the lucid surfaces of his poems ‘shimmer with a sense of something undefined ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... had been founded as a haven by and for outsiders. In 1917 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, dismissed several professors for protesting against America’s entry into World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by ...”

“... making possible TR’s preferred location for the Canal, Morris calls attention to a request from Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University, for a list of Roosevelt’s favourite books. Segments devoted to the tense drama unfolding in Washington and the Caribbean alternate with bibliographies that display TR’s extraordinary ...”

“... To write but avoid becoming a “writer”. This feeling against is insistent and true,’ wrote Murray Bail in a diary in London in 1971. Usually it’s the other way round, the ambition being to become ‘a writer’ and no longer have to write. Bail’s spare output over 25 years might put him in the same category, were it not shaped by the contrary intention expressed in that early warning to himself ...”

“... by Kenneth and Miriam Allott, were revised and reissued in 1979. A new edition is on the way from Nicholas Shrimpton. Cecil Lang is up to the second instalment of the Letters (despite fierce crossfire from rival scholars in the letters pages of the TLS). Following the line opened by Lionel Trilling’s ‘biography of a mind’ in America and by Raymond ...”

“... and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself,’ his colleague Murray Gell-Mann announced at Feynman’s memorial service, firmly flouting the nil nisi bonum convention. Feynman was also, among other things, a jerk. At his father’s funeral, he refused to recite the Kaddish, making his mother break down and cry. He seduced ...”

“... thanks only to the direct intervention, which Atlas never mentions, of the university president Nicholas Murray Butler, who had read admiring reviews in England of Trilling’s first book, on Matthew Arnold. At that same time, Harry Levin, somewhat younger than Trilling, was teaching in the Harvard English Department, where he had been a famously ...”

“... been temporarily altered to ‘wholesome’ by the reactionary president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler.) Publishers who were ready to pay for both book and serial rights also expected a certain kind of product; and even as they sought to market Wharton as a ‘classic’, they worried that she was too grim or out of touch for their ...”

“... Responsa, the latter being sets of answers to awkward questions, like the responsa given by Pope Nicholas I in 866 to missionaries in Bulgaria: ‘Are tournaments permitted in Lent?’ No. ‘Is judicial torture to continue?’ It is cruel and useless. And a hundred more. Were these conversions really conversions at all – apart from being conversions to a ...”

“... even if you didn’t share it. On the afternoon of 6 August 2013 Alex Henry, Janhelle Grant-Murray, Younis Tayyib and Cameron Ferguson, all aged 20 or 21, were involved in a fight in an Ealing street. The fight lasted around forty seconds and resulted in the death from a single stab wound of 21-year-old Taqui Khezihi; his brother Bourhane, aged 24, was ...”

“... come with connection to land. ‘Beyond choice, we see our loves/as indigenes see land,’ as Les Murray puts it in a recent poem. Lawyers contend that the extinction of a right pertaining to one particular racial group would contravene Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Other legal analysts are concerned by the uses to which history is being put in an ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part of Our Time entertained himself by naming some of them: They Shall Have Music, I Stole a Million, Army Girl, The Kid from Kokomo, Mama Runs Wild, Tenth Avenue Kid. One can think of exceptions (Angels with Dirty Faces, for instance), but the ...”