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“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... on the back of the fellow’s hand’. (‘That smacked of the sea,’ Holmes explains.) But we ourselves have not been allowed to note either this, or the military carriage, or the regulation side-whiskers, or ‘some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command’, or the manner in which the Marine held his head and swung his cane. As the ...”

“... Dr Swift’, Swift’s wry self-analysis of 1731, reads: ‘In the adversity of our best friends, we find something that doth not displease us.’ The poem goes on to identify Alexander Pope as his best friend. Later epigrammatists could lighten the point with self-deflating comedy: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ Gore Vidal ...”

“... stool after being pushed over by mammoths in the last interglacial? How do our woods, and the ways we have used them, compare with woods in other countries, for example in Japan? The largest and oldest wooden buildings in the world are in the complexes of ancient Japanese temples around Nara. Rackham is fascinating about British woodland history since Saxon ...”

“... and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir ...”

“... blue rages quietas pages.I tell you, Catullus, leave Troy, leave the ground burning, they did.Look we will change everything, all the meanings,all the clear cities of Asia you and me.Now the mind, isn’t she an avid previous hobo?Now the feet grow leaves so glad to see whose green baitsawaits.Oh sweet don’t goback the same way, go a new way.Catullus was ...”

“... he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a fault, showering all around him with precious rings, brooches, luxurious robes, huge consignments of firewood and deer from his forests. The gifts he received from others he regifted, also on a heroic scale. When he ran out of cash ...”

“... fifteen years. (Once, during a strained public conversation in Waterstone’s, Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient yelling: ‘How often do you sleep with prostitutes?’) But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather ...”

“... literary achievement. His ‘failure’, if it can be called such, lay in undervaluing his gifts. John Jay Chapman blamed Adams and his fellow ‘dilettanti’ for admiring America too much and despising her too much: ‘They could not help bowing the knee to success, though they did so with a sneer upon their lips.’ The letters bear him out. Adams made ...”

“... the screenplay of Ben-Hur – ‘I suspect that Heston does not know to this day what luridness we managed to contrive around him’): essays which were reprinted in various collections and have finally come to rest in United States: Essays 1952-92, a lap-buster of nearly 1300 pages. In 1995, Vidal wove his memoirs into a dance of the seven veils called ...”

“... and always, a writer, flush with rage. He was an elective invisible. The artisan, the artificer. John Bayley, describing James Joyce in a review in this journal, called him ‘the penman of the family’. Praise indeed. A curse from which there is no possible abdication, a lifelong task, and one which Ian Penman has accepted with quixotic and sharp-witted ...”

“... vicar of St Giles Cripplegate; master of Pembroke College, Cambridge; prebendary of St Paul’s; dean of Westminster; and bishop of Chichester, Ely and, finally, Winchester. What must have seemed a surprising tribute from the premier poet of Modernism to a relatively forgotten cleric was of course part of Eliot’s own journey towards a conservative (and at ...”

“... The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading ...”

“... docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few of us would care to notice in life. We’d rather look away. But when it comes to Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), there isn’t a moment’s doubt: forget the forlorn, would-be contender, this guy is a champion the first moment we see him, a shabby ...”