“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”

“... attempt to shore it up.San Francisco is often described as a cauldron of crime and depravity, and held up as proof that progressive policies don’t work. I spent some time in New Mexico last summer and found that when people heard where I was from they were aghast: they wanted to know how I was surviving the mayhem. In recent years right-wing media have ...”

“... That same day, a demonstration of a tracked Killen-Strait tractor crossing various obstacles was held at Wembley Park for the benefit of Churchill and Lloyd George. It led to a decision to shift responsibility for the Landships Committee from the Admiralty to Lloyd George’s Ministry of Munitions as soon as sufficient progress had been made. Just a few days ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... feel a certain awe at Shadwell, it is because Dryden has caught in him the mundanity of all time, held in a locus classicus of history, a century of revolution. If epics die, Shadwell is not the only dullard. The poem finds a genuine mystery in the lapses and failures of civilisation, as if we only perceive the supernatural through what is boring in the ...”

“... process to oversee budgets, schedules and scripts. In Hollywood’s Golden Age, Irving Thalberg is held up by all as the epitome of the creative producer, a man of taste and collaborative skill, whose model of excellence has long since vanished from the movie-making scene. ‘No profession of producer really exists today,’ Billy Wilder said. ‘Most ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... Usmani and in the spring, the McCormick Foundation and the ultra-con Center for Security Policy held an anti-sharia finance workshop in Illinois where his published views about jihad and the subjugation of unbelievers came under scrutiny. Media attention now turned to the Illinois mutual. In 2007, somewhere in the sprawling paperwork for a federal ...”

“... is not only in a redundant format, but in an antique form of a redundant format; the cassette is held together by metal screws. In a sure, deep voice, with an English 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 ...”

“... the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s length, accepting, as Brooke’s friend Jacques Raverat put it, ‘his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural’. In the summer of 1910 Olivier agreed to become engaged to Brooke, but she wanted ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”