“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a ...”

“... immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of the Thames Gateway, of a triumphalist police outing, a reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave. A reunion attended, in true British fashion, by a ...”

“... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking; activities, as A.O. Scott remarked in his review of Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic, that from the outside look much the same. There is something very Kant-like, I used to think, about smoking, the analytics and architectonics you build when you inhale, exhale, yet all of it ...”

“... private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

“... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at ...”

“... were widely known and condoned, although the authoritative accounts by Generals Maurice Challe, Paul Ely and André Beaufre had not yet appeared. I can well remember lunching in Paris in the spring of 1959 with a journalist on the paper which had acquired the French serial rights from the Times. He implored me to persuade Eden to deal with the charge of ...”

“... spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop ...”

“... less important as a signifier of classiness. (I was pleased to discover that, 23 years apart, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both chose John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ as their favourite record.)Despite its slightly lacklustre start, Desert Island Discs picked up a following and ran for 67 episodes before being mothballed in 1946 after BBC radio was ...”

“... he himself, though exiled and out of favour through accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some ...”

“... the court hearing evidence of the perjury, he had attempted, apparently on the advice of John Scott, the then attorney-general, to persuade the judge to call a halt to the trial by instructing the jury to return a special verdict, stating that the facts of the case were exactly as charged, and reserving to the judges the decision as to what crime if any ...”

“... more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds its own, Vietnam-nourished insight. Willard has changed, but home has changed too, transformed itself into an idea only other people ...”

“... he mentions ‘rackety parties’, ‘the rackety side of life’ (this in connection with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell ...”

“... panel), but the last thing they aspire to be is fair. A fan is someone with a dog in the fight.Paul Campos, a law professor, has been a fanatical supporter of the University of Michigan American football team, the Wolverines, since early childhood. In the late 1990s he began visiting the online message boards where Wolverines fans gather to share the ...”

“... the hillside and are spreading over the lower meadow. Yes, the hill is coming down with hazel, as Paul Muldoon says. I’ve brought a bow saw with me and I begin cutting away some of the tall wands. Should I be disturbing this place? In among the stones, as I lift them, are a few large torpid worms which I put in the shopping bag I’ve brought. There’s a ...”