“... much else) of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, then wholesale later on. It read like a ready amalgam of Lewis Carroll, nursery rhymes and the Goons, though Lennon himself located its centre of gravity elsewhere. ‘I went through my Dylanesque period a long time ago with songs like “I am the Walrus”,’ he remarked in last year’s Playboy interview: ‘the ...”

“... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...”

“... New York but Minneapolis, where the behaviourist B.F. Skinner worked, and where, since 1969, Thomas Bouchard has taught a course on the ‘measurement’ of individual personalities and twins. ‘Not every university offers such a course,’ Bouchard has remarked, ‘in part because race, gender and class differences are closely compared, which arouses ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... what fun Bunny had’ – as if his job stopped at sourcing the raw material for a story.Paul Thomas Anderson therefore had room to experiment when he adapted the novel for the screen as There Will Be Blood (2007). His protagonist, Daniel Plainview (the role for which Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar), is a much ...”

“... obstacle to the historical understanding of Burke has been the extraordinary detestation which Sir Lewis Namier conceived for him and all his works, and which was transmitted to Namier’s authoritatively placed disciples. He is right to combat this, because it took the form of persistent denigration of Burke’s character and motives; unfortunately, he has ...”

“... peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction that ‘in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force’ was validated by the swift capitulation of the Taliban. Iraq was logically the next target. As the columnist ...”

“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that ...”

“... around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael ...”

“... system that had once been popular with students and sermon note-takers, and was later used by Thomas Jefferson. Pepys had included a tachygraphy manual in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and Tomalin concludes that poor Smith ‘carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library’. Loveman’s careful analysis of the ...”

“... constituencies, fathom the reality behind the polemics of Cobbett and the satire of Dickens and Thomas Love Peacock. These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes ...”

“... has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the ...”

“... the livery of the messenger. When, now and again, an author does allude to the look of a page (Lewis Carroll’s ‘Mouse’s Tale’, Sterne’s marbled interfoliations) it is intended to be cheeky – as a flunky, standing behind the speaker’s chair at a grand dinner, would sound if invited to interject. Typography, the advocates of transparency ...”