“... as in its faults. It is generally accurate on points of detail, despite the confusion between two Peter Martyrs and the erroneous assumption that there was only one Compagnia della Calza – there were, in fact, scores of these noble dramatic societies. Lord Norwich writes a vigorous and fluent prose. He is unafraid of moral judgments and even personification ...”

“... part was small, but at one point he was required to take off his shirt’). At times I felt I was reading a cosmopolitan, if not actually louche, Barbara Pym, in a faded fastidiousness, or fastidious fadedness, which is so smoothly done that it, and almost everything but the style, can slip by unnoticed. But the after-effect is poignant and strong. There is a ...”

“... in his later years: his ideas, therefore, being neither renovated by discourse, nor increased by reading, wore gradually away, and left his mind vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his anger was heightened into madness.’ But cases like that of Monet, who preferred a blurred world, suggest that vanity cannot account for all coyness about ...”

“... easy fluency. (Digger is, although silent, a linguistic prodigy. His sister finds him not reading in bed, but telling over books he has by heart; he remembers anything once heard, can recite whole plays by Shakespeare; in the camps he becomes a living muster-roll which records the names and fate of the members of his battalion.) But there is a place ...”

“... campaign that he had conceived of in 1947 would be successful in the end.’ Nor, on this reading, was it simply a swing in ideological fashion, susceptible of intellectual, psychological, sociological or political explanation. The persistent suggestion is that economic liberalism came into its own at this moment because history proved it right. The ...”

“... for being so. It makes my heart pound still, although I know the outcome, for the thrill of reading about these great occasions does not diminish: scientists are like cricket-lovers who never tire of reading or recounting what Colin Milburn used to do to short balls on the leg side from Wesley Hall.Florey’s and his ...”

“... photographs and diagrams of everything pertinent . . . The guide would be among my favourite reading if only it wasn’t in Portuguese.’ The structure of The Secret Life of Trees is encyclopedic. The book is thick with incidental information. Some acacias, when nibbled, produce chemicals that make their leaves unpalatable. More remarkably, a signal ...”

“... their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes. To Joe Ackerley in 1947 from the USA: ‘the view from the window is the Californian desert, mistaken by me for the Nevadan ... we seem to have reached Nevada after all ... my Parker 51 ink is checked in my grip for ...”

“... into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... exclude Cicero and Virgil, exhibits the proper taste for the antique and the antiquarian. As in reading, so in writing. Latin of the Golden Age had dealt in paragraphs, Latin of the Silver Age – the original age of the sound bite – in phrases. Now the stylist focused on the word, the good word that, well-placed, gives distinction to the sentence. And a ...”

“... wars, is optimistic. When the war was won in Europe Capa talked of having a card printed reading ‘Robert Capa, War Photographer, Unemployed’. Certainly no other employment ever suited him so well. He tried movies, did a number of travel pieces for Holiday magazine, and in the end (and fatally) a little more war work. He was filling in for a Life ...”

“... intelligence that compensates for growing old. As Hercule Poirot had waxed moustaches, Lord Peter Wimsey collected first editions and Nero Wolfe wore yellow pyjamas, so Wexford is the sort of man who is always badly dressed and is never certain of having a clean handkerchief. Like Appleby, he has a tendency to quote from literature, but the detective ...”

“... been undergraduates after the first, Su, who we guess is doomed as soon as we’re told she’s reading chemistry. Young beauties blow through Oxford on adventures of their own, afloat on the tide of the new youth culture, easy pickings; they ask the way to a hostel and are invited back to the magic theatre – ‘long blonde hair, a slim figure in ...”