“... which divided Shakespeareans in the late 18th century, dealing convincingly, for example, with Joseph ‘Viper’ Ritson, who emerges from this account less the wronged radical some would have him than the Eric Sams of his day, his valuable insights warped out of all useful shape by obsessive hobbyhorsing. Martin is willing to acknowledge the points at ...”

“... to the Polish-Arab Friendship Society whom he hadn’t offended. Like the speaker in Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’, here was someone to throw the book at: And when they would finally arrest me for espionage, for subversive activity, vagrancy, for ménage à trois ... It was Brodsky again who archly pointed out that ‘a ...”

“... how the Arctic region is acting as the canary in the coal mine’. Earlier this year, McCain and Joseph Lieberman sponsored a bipartisan bill calling for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bush’s victory and the increased influence of the Republican right mean there’s now no prospect of the bill being adopted, let alone signed. Tony Blair, in a speech in ...”

“... in Ram Karan’s voice, with this wonderful sentence: ‘I needed to force money from Father Joseph, and it made me nervous.’ The Delhi details of the novel are profuse and precise – apartment buildings, houses, roofs, streets, surrounding countryside, buses, food, movies, rickshaws, cows, boys playing cricket, takeout from Pizza King – but the ...”

“... He published the following eloquent statement drafted by the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, and Joseph Reinach, the first historian of the Dreyfus Affair: The government of the Republic gives me back my liberty. It is nothing to me without honour. As of today, I shall continue to pursue reparation for the frightful judicial error of which I am still the ...”

“... poems in Montaigne’s Tower are nearly as fine as ‘His Swans’. I think of ‘Habitat’, ‘Joseph Haydn’, ‘In the Zoo’ and ‘What goes to which?’ as good companions to earlier successes: ‘Une Vie’, ‘Again discard the night’, ‘Not Visited Enough’, ‘Yahoos: A Variation and Reply’, ‘Paddington Street’, ‘Note on the ...”

“... my career. They wouldn’t publish the book, they said, as a favour to me.’ In London, however, Michael Joseph agreed to publish Giovanni’s Room and, later, in New York, a small publisher, the Dial Press, offered to bring the book out. It first appeared in 1956. Both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room were declarations of independence ...”

“... like an old film? It’s hard to get a grip on things when the ridiculous is so rampant. Or as Joseph Conrad puts it in another situation, it’s difficult to take many violent people as seriously as the incidental atrocity of their methods deserves. He was thinking of Latin American dictators, but the remark applies perhaps even more to Al Capone after ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... and self-help’ but also, Bermant thinks, an affinity with ‘Jewish associates such as Sir Keith Joseph’ (though surely Joseph – scion of a rich Anglo-Jewish family, Harrow, Magdalen, All Souls, wounded in action and mentioned in dispatches – was something of a patrician himself). Her devotees on both sides of the ...”

“... Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum ...”

“... in practice, and in any case an immense task of sorting, translating, and analysing lies ahead. Michael Howard, for instance, in a characteristically crisp introduction to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only ...”

“... meant providing the scenario and captions for silent pictures). Mank’s younger brother, Joseph, followed four years later, also on a Paramount contract, and went on to write and direct movies including A Letter to Three Wives and All about Eve, which won him two Oscars. Mank’s own career wasn’t quite so dazzling, but his work on the screenplay ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... of Aphra Behn, Defoe, Fielding or Smollett, while Dickens ignored the subject of sex altogether. Michael Mason’s main problem is to determine how prudery affected behaviour. Was it merely a veneer of hypocrisy, covering up a very different sexual reality? Were there fewer, and less enjoyable, sexual acts inside and outside marriage? Wild figures once ...”