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“... affairs; it was a massive misjudgment in his own area of expertise that brought him down. Although Richard Lamb says that ‘Eden’s premiership foundered solely because of the Suez affair’ (which begs the question, much discussed at the time in the press, of whether it would not otherwise have soon foundered on something else), his book deals with the ...”

“... Instead, I organised a lunch at which three speakers would talk about war in literature. I invited Richard Lamb, an expert on the Second World War, to talk about Churchill’s war blunders, on which he’d written a book; and Martin Gilbert to speak about the fate of the Jews during the same period. No one would be able to accuse us of having a frivolous ...”

“... land lost by England is Uruguay, given up by her in favour of the Falklands. The novel’s hero, Richard Lamb, at first much regrets the exchange of this ‘green world’ for ‘the desolate haunt of seals and penguins’. After he has roamed its fastnesses and met its half-wild inhabitants his views are different. To introduce the material prosperity ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and ...”

“... was a world where high thinking went with ramshackle living. Haydon’s friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet Keats. Charles ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered ...”

“... hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional ...”

“... open and their pupils erased. In the second section, set in 1991, a cad and a bounder called Hugo Lamb – Mitchell likes writing about cads – shags and cheats his way through his Cambridge days, before encountering first Holly Sykes and then a shadowy group of immortals. In the third, set in 2004, a war reporter – the father of Holly’s child ...”

“... making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London perambulator who desired no more from life (apart from a decent income) than to savour and capture the variety and energy of city living. Scharf (1788-1860) was an itinerant Bavarian artist whom the fortunes of war eventually ...”

“... Palmer, Goya, a miniature of the bewitching Cornelia Boinville (disturbingly like Lady Caroline Lamb), a sketch-plan by Edward Williams of the interior of the Don Juan boat, showing folding tables, lockers, and ‘Shilo’s library’ skilfully fitted round the bulkhead. Ah, dreams of ...”

“... He discriminates between both periods and authors, drawing out the ‘passion for Heaven’ in Richard Baxter, the ‘clarity and assurance’ characteristic of Watts, Addison’s gentlemanliness, Charles Wesley’s ‘physicality’, Montgomery as ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer’, the whisper and privacy in Keble’s ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare wielding (well, almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called ...”

“... having your attention, and is then often vague or crass about what to do with it. Only one piece, Richard Wilson’s 20:50, a room-sized tank of sump oil, borrows much force from the building. It is even more effective here, reflecting wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it ...”