“... passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill – known as the Bright Bill, after the MP who introduced it – which increased the maximum penalties for throwing illegal parties: promoters now faced fines as high as £20,000 and jail sentences of up to six months. Specialist police teams like the Pay Party Unit, which was based in Kent but ...”

“... kind: precipitation, bonding and legitimation, functions emphasised by C.S.L. Davies and by S.M. Harrison in his account of the supposedly religionless rising in the Lake Counties. To restrict ‘religion’ in the 16th century to matters ‘spiritual’ and to ‘Catholic idealism’, even to exclude the preservation of monasteries as a ...”

“... about battle: I’ve only been in that kind of situation where someone’s been shooting at me, a total of about twelve times altogether – in Ireland, in Aden, and we had a couple of dust-ups with the Eoka lot in Cyprus. You get a little bit of headiness out of the situation, you do, because that’s what you’ve been trained for. You don’t feel ...”

“... A tiger in the head or a tiger in the typewriter wouldn’t be rated.The other remark came from me. I can’t remember what provoked it, but Karl was acting forlorn, counting up imagined ways in which his friends had let him down, failed to conceal their scorn for him or edged away in some other manner. I was irritated, and I said: ‘You know, Karl, in ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... stir-crazy after the holiday. We are sitting facing the car park and the row of shops beyond.Me: What is that shop called?R: Which?Me: It looks to me like ‘Hot Faeces’.R: It’s ‘Fat Face’.Between a shop calling itself Fat Face and one called Hot Faeces seems a difference of ...”

“... language of pleasure, which uses words like impact, force, explosive, shock, searing. ‘I find my voice falters in the site of pleasure,’ she confesses, ‘that I have no words for it, that there, I am gagged ... Is saying something violently saying it well? Is feeling something violently feeling it in the only possible way? In a study of the ...”

“... reader, the Norton has gained weight since 1962. (Four kilos is the latest figure, according to my local greengrocer’s scales.) Designed to be read ‘anywhere – in a coffeehouse, on a bus, or under a tree’, its six thousand pages are now too hefty to prop open, let alone carry. The bloating of the seven successive editions registers the Shandean ...”

“... and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject. The stamina of biographers often amazes me, and Walsh certainly doesn’t lack it: he has tracked Stravinsky’s movements in minute detail. He marshals his facts into a narrative that, while unpretentiously chronicle-like, is never flat, and he is a stylish writer and sharp analyst of music. His ...”

“... it: ‘It was so delicious and delightful. For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin. Nothing.’ Now she’s in her seventies, she has ‘a protein and vitamin powder’ that she mixes with coconut water and that tastes ‘satisfyingly familiar’. She ...”

“... resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son once astutely noted in his father, ‘a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its ...”

“... 2 January. I’m sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday ...”

“... we reach a climax that only Britons can reach, and I realise I can be nowhere in the world but in my native England. In 1938, Wood celebrated his 50th anniversary on the podium, and he conducted a special jubilee Prom in his own honour on 5 October, the second half of which was broadcast, and which concluded with ‘Pomp and Circumstance’. But before the ...”

“... Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought ...”

“... them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In each case what he discovered was an egregious instance of an ongoing wrong systemic to the US ...”