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“... to Burma, Barack Obama telephoned her to secure her approval. David Cameron did the same before William Hague’s trip; and when I asked a British government official how Hague could be sure that Thein Sein was ‘sincere’, he replied that it was because the ‘the Lady’ thought so. Unlike Nelson Mandela, she has always rejected armed struggle. Unlike ...”

“... responding on such a level to a sage whose writing, filled with a passionate concern for the (white, male) working poor (and contempt, it sometimes seems, for nearly everyone else), set the terms in which Victorian Britain debated its social and moral state. It is even more discomfiting (indifference seeming even now not an option) to find the ...”

“... television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an ...”

“... was: “Egypt angry! You should hear what my aunt Anna said!”’ Working with the director William Wyler was right up her street; he was ‘totally open to my ideas … He understood the way I worked, and my need to feel free enough to invent something new on the spur of the moment.’ Wyler, another famous perfectionist, said that Streisand ‘trusted ...”

“... go on talking for hours but, alas, I’ve got to fly ... I’m meeting someone at the NFT – the William Wellman retrospective – it’s terribly late and I’ve got the tickets ... ’ Such interruptions as these continued to be a daily occurrence throughout a period of several weeks, during which I was indeed able to think about the memoir at regular ...”

“... Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the most recent monitoring visit from Ofsted showed definite progress. But schools know they are in ...”

“... steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense as if under great pressure from a hose’, as William Empson put it. Coming on the attack here, though, you need to get beyond the blank stare and the affectless inventory that ‘speaks for itself’, that declares: ‘and this is literally all there is to it.’ (‘We are presented with a piece of ...”

“... probably should have done nothing, but sending the cable made my life sweeter,’ he told William Alfred. A week or so earlier Alfred had written to him saying ‘Frank has given me The Dolphin to read. It is beautifully made, every line won hard, and it is sad and comforting at one and the same time. But 1 and 2 on page 47’ – ‘Fox-Fur’ and ...”

“... published in 1980, has an undertone of a story from the Old Testament mixed with a novel by William Faulkner. It’s a narrative of misfortune and pestilence, an account of survival in a rugged landscape against all the odds, told in a tone which is fearless, poetic, elaborate in its cadences but also, at times, sharp and precise, and at other times ...”

“... to see the tender and constant feelings which Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has for her brother William, also away at sea, as being a fundamental part of Austen’s emotional world. The novel begins by breaking a family, by taking Fanny from her own impoverished family and handing her over, almost as a changeling, to the care of her two aunts. The fact that ...”

“... the reservations she had held all along.When Major lost heavily to Blair in 1997, Thatcher backed William Hague to succeed him, swinging enough MPs behind her choice to get him comfortably over the line. When Hague lost to Blair just as badly four years later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth ...”

“... undead – silky and nocturnal-looking in black vampire cape, tricorn hat, pointy flamenco shoes, white geisha make-up and a slash of dark red lipstick. This ghoulish get-up seems to have made her irresistible. Cohen rehearses de Acosta’s astonishing sensual history gracefully enough, but her main goal is to persuade us that de Acosta was also an ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”

“... the recent Tate catalogue of Cahun photographs owned by the Jersey Heritage Trust, she sports a white leotard and boxing shorts – comically accessorised with cattle-rustler kerchief, wrist-guards and Betty Boop lipstick. Crudely printed across her chest, graffiti-style, are the gnomic words ‘I Am in Training Don’t Kiss Me’ and a pair of pouty ...”

“... of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another subject: ‘The contradictions cover such a range’ – yet they are always reciprocal, in communication with each other. The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear has ...”