“... of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... thought it safe Stock returned to Britain, probably about 1803, and was taken on by the radical Dr Thomas Beddoes as an assistant at his Medical Institution for the Benefit of the Sick and Drooping Poor at the Hotwells, Bristol; and when Beddoes died a few years later, his widow, Anna, commissioned Stock to write up his life and works. He responded by ...”

“... who were, as the cliché goes, famous for being famous. But in her life Antonia White was never more than fairly famous for being fairly famous; and her work cannot bear any more weight than it has already had to. Sadly, for herself and for us, she was a writer with serious limitations. The success of Frost in May, which ...”

“... perestroika, it was even possible to see the point of another ubiquitous slogan: ‘Lenin is more alive than all the living!’ Not any longer. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Lenin cult has been systematically destroyed. Thousands of streets and squares, parks and museums, factories and farms, not to speak of towns and cities, have ...”

“... was prime minister than when he wasn’t. The reason that Great Britain is usually happier and more relaxed under a Labour than under a Conservative government lies in the British instinct for self-preservation. The rich are more capable of exercising this instinct than the poor. Better-equipped, better-educated, better ...”

“... 70 questions on it, most of which were answered for almost all the parishes. There was also the more usual information-gathering exercise by interview. The result of the inquiry is an enormous stock of detailed information covering diet, prices, wages, amenities, facilities for saving and social policy. The authors, supported by a grant from the Social ...”

“... the bestselling American novel until Gone with the Wind. Everyone seemed to be very Christian, more than half the books they printed were Bibles, and most of the press operators had served in the army. Liberals in town had started a rifle buy-back programme. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn watching television, which I didn’t have at home, and ...”

“... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...”

“... seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... to have held that office. Now a non-Jesuit historian has monumentalised the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable ...”

“... and pulpitry’; only to end and cancel out his own argument by a series of comminations more sweeping and prejudiced than Leavis at his worst. The damned include, since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... our shared sentence: ‘I shall be dead.’ The poet A.E. Stallings faces up to the unknown in a more tender voice in ‘Another Bedtime Story’: The tales that start with once and end with ever after, All, all of the stories are about going to bed, About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread Of laying the body down, of lying under a ...”

“... G–G recycle their own portraits, varying them dramatically from one work to another. They are more obviously industrious and inventive than Warhol, who would have disdained G–G’s hard work and obvious ambition. Roland Barthes said that it is the human detail in a photograph that always catches our interest or sympathy, but these pictures have no such ...”

“... outcome of these talks is easy to surmise: they will end with all the nuclear powers possessing more nuclear weapons than they did when the talks started. Once I would have worried about this also. Now I look forward to drinking the Perrier water even if the water talks succeed. To speak the truth, not an invariable practice with me, I do not care in the ...”