“... book seems to have been hopelessly unfinished at the time of his death. In Capote’s case, we may be forgiven for asking if the fame didn’t far outstrip the promise, and if his was rather less a major talent dissipated than a minor gift cleverly marketed. Taking the generous view of Capote’s talent and importance after the publication of his first ...”

“... that the Henry Moore Foundation might help a publisher, so a number of old conversations may yet see print. I was an inquisitive, I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank ...”

“... Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In this privately-sponsored Olympic Games that wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates ...”

“... outré authorities on pop music (such as Joe Orton) and a few anti-pop pieces (by Paul Johnson and Richard Hoggart, among others). Liveliest and most useful are the contemporary reports documenting specific occasions: Elvis Presley recording ‘Hound Dog’, Decca turning down the Beatles, the Rolling Stones at Altamont, the Osmonds at the Rainbow Theatre, the ...”

“... who has wondered whether the history of the United States can be forced into a Thatcherite mould may well find the book of interest. Johnson announces at the outset that he comes to American history ‘completely fresh’, with no qualifications other than a love of the country and a willingness to immerse himself in the literature of its past. It’s true ...”

“... allows us a glimpse of what he read and when. It’s clear he read a great deal and some of it may now seem esoteric – Socrates Scholasticus’s Historia Ecclesiastica, for instance – but there is little that is unusual for the time. Nor is there anything that suggests an early radicalism. The histories he read between 1639 and 1643 must have informed ...”

“... G.E. Moore, drily reported that the Tractatus was ‘a work of genius, but be that as it may’ met the requirements for a PhD. The rest of Wittgenstein’s work was published after his death, and a lot of it abandons academic decorum for aphorisms, snatches of dialogue, cryptic musings, teasing questions and homely images. Benjamin, too, is a master ...”

“... She has been celebrated as a stylish genre defier, in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Richard Price – and her books sell. French’s opening salvo was leaving one of the chief mysteries in her first novel, In the Woods, unsolved. Since then, she has demonstrated remarkable range. The classic detective series follows a single familiar ...”

“... but this was a parliament in which council members played leading roles. The king in council may not have been able to enact legislation but he could certainly make ordinances in areas of government such as foreign relations and control of the military, trade, printing, coinage and aliens. Over the following centuries, the council became a central part ...”

“... employed by scientific journals. The case for restricting an industrial pollutant, for example, may be substantial, and urgent for public health, and at the same time incomplete. The Data Quality Act and its peer-review provisions, Mooney points out, ‘simply give industry groups, which already have a right to challenge final regulations in court, multiple ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... forums with a couple of dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers ...”

“... dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 ...”

“... play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual ...”

“... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...”