“... old friends and (last year’s useful word) old frenemies – people you don’t like but may someday need. The conference attracts literary scholars from all over the world. Sipping espresso at an outdoor café, I met a Swiss critic of contemporary French fiction, on his first trip to the United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly ...”

“... lawyers that would make any plea, or any combination of pleas, feasible. His original lawyer, Robert Shapiro, is famous for defending Marlon Brando’s son when he killed his sister’s lover several years ago (this was one of the first cases to be shown on the now very popular Court TV). To this shining example of legal virtue, O.J. has subsequently ...”

“... It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for instance, there ...”

“... little measurable influence on sexual orientation in adulthood. Whatever this proves – and it may only prove that the roots of sexual orientation cannot be uncovered by questionnaires – it does not sustain the assertion the authors go on to make: i.e. that homosexuality may be biologically coded. If becoming gay is ...”

“... and wisecracks; you slap your thighs, he is suddenly vulnerably sensitive and very cultivated. May Week was in June, the last instalment of his on-off autobiography, discloses that for years he has been laboriously studying Japanese in a spirit of anything but racist superiority. The volume ends with a carpe diem in James’s hyper-sensitive mode. The ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... who led the 1904 invasion of Tibet and would help finance and organise the Everest attempts, may have been ‘imperialist to the core’, but he was also one of the first to cultivate a mystical appreciation of Tibetan culture, inspiring him to found the World Congress of Faiths. Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition, lived a life ...”

“... will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’s memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest.’ Gandhi notwithstanding, scholars and polemicists continue to catalogue the crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are ...”

“... soup cans (‘Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day’), asked Robert Indiana if Pop was ‘easy art’ (‘Yes’), and sought Jim Dine’s views on whether Pop offers social commentary (‘I’m certainly not changing the world … if it’s art, who cares if it’s a comment?’). He also asked Lichtenstein: ‘Is Pop art ...”

“... following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut down the Gulf Stream for two millennia. Robert Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, scorned the prediction of a sea-level rise of up to 0.59 metres; the figure now looked like a metre at the very least, and he showed a map of what that rise would do to Egypt, the Caspian shores and ...”

“... was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a spell in the Bodleian the collection ...”

“... literary editor of the Spectator in 1958, he first commissioned reviews from him, adding: ‘I may have given the impression that Frank Kermode was new to the reading public when he started writing for the paper. That was not the case. He’d already made his name with his fine book, Romantic Image.’ Well, yes, he had in a sense made his name with that ...”

“... per cent of it to three buyers for a total of more than $15 million. Consigning it to auction in May 2019, he was confident it needed to go for only $6.5 million for him to be able to repay them all. This may seem deranged to you and me, but Whitfield has studied the documents and thinks he was probably right – though by ...”

“... and Charmian’s, has not been entirely open-handed – two recent biographers of London, Robert Barltrop and John Perry, were denied archive or copyright materials. Sinclair was given a free hand, although it’s not clear that he was allowed to examine Charmian’s diaries and private papers, which have been even more closely guarded than her ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”