“... of the earlier volumes, but, having made available one of the finest collections of letters in English, he could afford to ignore them. It is easy to see that Shaw irritated people in late as in early life. Being vain and assertive, or finding it convenient to wear a mask of assertive vanity, he writes in the same breezily authoritative tone on virtually ...”

“... Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less disappeared from public view. His fame rests primarily on what can for convenience be thought of as his three great novels of ...”

“... retrospectively – to condition his or her subject’s story by reading in from the work itself. Richard Bradford’s recent life of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear, seems to illustrate the belief that the man who wrote ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘High Windows’ must have lived like Mr Bleaney but with higher windows: Bradford describes him, during 1955, as a ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... millions of casualties. It was characteristic of him not to see anything odd about adding: ‘An English historian can praise ... Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ Carr’s views and prose style owed much to his experience of the Foreign Office, which he did not leave until his mid-forties. At Cambridge, he excelled as a ...”

“... street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is Canning. His face is very small.Only Gillray could have rendered the anti-revolutionary mood with such comprehensive hysterics – the whole crowd of figures suspended between fear and fervour, with something weirdly ...”

“... and authorship in the past thirty years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more ...”

“... Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The leader of the study group was Richard Perle, who became head – now, after press disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for ...”

“... extremism by their teachers.’ And it saw no evidence at all of ‘an organised plot to take over English schools’. But by then the soundbites had gone round the world and back again – Fox News claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff ...”

“... voice’ proved a particular annoyance. Keynes, meanwhile, was the archetype of the haughty English lord; as White remarked to the British economist Lionel Robbins, ‘your Baron Keynes sure pees perfume.’ Squabbles aside, the two men ended up largely in agreement about the basic aims of the new international monetary system: to stabilise exchange ...”

“... Liberal Party. Thomas-Symonds makes clear that it made a difference which valley you came from. English-speaking towns like Ebbw Vale and Tredegar in Monmouthshire were Labour towns, unsusceptible to the apocalyptic communism of the Rhondda Valley slightly further west. In his early years, before he became a Labour councillor, Bevan was attracted by the ...”

“... suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in 1968, which Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major ...”