“... wrestled with the desire to be praised openly for his denial of worldly values’.Cut from here to Mark Twain’s ‘The Story of a Good Little Boy’ (who does this remind you of?):Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He wanted to be put in with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother … and pictures ...”

“... films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat ...”

“... country ballads, John Wesley Harding. In a sense the conspiracy theory wasn’t far off the mark. The crash wasn’t a fiction, but it was – or it served as – a moment of sudden and drastic re-evaluation. As Shelton drily remarks, ‘it was widely reported that Dylan nearly lost his life. It seems more likely that the mishap saved his life.’ ‘In ...”

“... one presumably needs to make sense of everything else).The most significant book published to mark Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational ...”

“... material’, as scripts were called at the studio, were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film ...”

“... Americanisms and entirely in earnest.Presenting the document at the Pentagon, its author, Laura Taylor-Kale, underscored the need for the state to boost its defence industry as America’s adversaries build up their military power to levels not seen since the Second World War. She noted the intensifying threat of China upending the existing international ...”

“... in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got the right ...”

“... slimeRise and deride this sepulchre of crime.When war is claimed as a mother of invention (A.J.P. Taylor, Paul Virilio), that invention is hardly intended to signify the memorials that constitute a quintessential building type of the 1920s, albeit not much of one. Although medals were fashioned of different metals according to the status of the award, men ...”

“... At my high school, Daphne du Maurier was on the English department reading list, along with Taylor Caldwell and all those other books by Twain. I read Sydney Sheldon’s first five novels, Judith Krantz’s first three; until I went to college, I believed that Watership Down was the best book I’d ever read – and I was right. What attracted me ...”

“... More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s graceful mirror at the end of the ...”

“... could find no place for it, and in the book as it stands, they have had to employ italics to mark the status of several flashbacks. Some of these sections – the relentless teasing of Rufus by a pack of older boys; a visit by the family to back-country relatives – go on too long and hardly fit the narrative. Reading this work of memory and ...”

“... that they are ‘ordinary virtues’, and that their opposites are ‘ordinary vices’. Charles Taylor, whom Gordon cites, lists five features of these ‘ordinary virtues’: they are rooted in dispositions accessible to anyone; they begin at home, in daily life; they subsist in the interaction of each of us with our fellow human beings at the first level ...”

“... neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor said that Channon’s ‘rank highest among the political diaries of the period: written, as all good diaries should be, by a man not ashamed to own his weaknesses, it recaptures perfectly the atmosphere of the 1930s.’ Reading the two diaries long ago, I ...”

“... thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either ...”

“... on me, for marriage. You see, marriage for Melodia was what it must have been for Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Hutton, no big thing; and in Melodia’s case, a natural consequence of sodomy and prayer. Mother sat between Melodia and me, with Father across the table, scowling at the prices on the dinner menu. I know what he was thinking: how can they get ...”