“... to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too much. ‘Life-styles,’ he says in his Preface, are my subject, and ...”

“... Few presences were more imposing in postwar poetry than that of T.S. Eliot, but from his eminence as the Pope of Russell Square, Eliot has now shrunk to something more like a holy ghost. Pound’s right-wing unpleasantness, because so deranged, seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least ...”

“... historian, journalist, MP and PM, drinking, smoking, eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close friends as their personalities permitted, and it may be argued that anyone who is thankful that Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side should ...”

“... they dart under canopies of fallen leaves. Fish sleep with their eyes open: not our kind of sleep, more like our kind of daydream. Awake but not awake, just like me; living to eat and conserve energy, just like me; devoid of answers, just like me; comfortable in their doom, just like me. These days goldfish are my homies.Fishing is an occasion for hope. In my ...”

“... There were​ more than a million women in early 16th-century England, yet we remain obsessively interested in the life and death of just one. The usual, if sensational, explanation is that Anne Boleyn was a woman of unconventional but irresistible charm, with exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes ...”

“... the greatest miseries to which human nature is liable.’ Though their tones could hardly differ more, Pilkington and Orrery had the same idea: what made Swift a satirist was what made him, eventually, go out of his mind. It is as if being him were intolerable. Biographers have been drawn to Swift by this sense that there must have been something singular ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... Sylvester, often hard to understand. So much drink in the book that I wonder, had I liked drink more, would it have altered my life and made it more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I ...”

“... Hollywood the dream empire and Silicon Valley the information empire both arose there, and she more or less claims that neither could have sprung from anywhere else. Solnit also claims that Muybridge – his peculiar inventive work and changeable life, his very personality – contributed, at their genesis in the emerging technologies of his time, to the ...”

“... criticism’. Partly, the crisis which now afflicts English studies is a reflection of a more general cultural atmosphere – for example, that futureless and pastless sense of blankness which is for various reasons the quality that distinguishes the present generation of students. It could also be seen as a response to the period of critical ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”

“... to seek a poetic equivalent for Neruda’s moony-stony-windy-bloody rhetoric in pastiche Dylan Thomas, or for his vatic tone in Ginsberg’s spaced-out measures, but both of these devices would have risked who knows what comic effects. Something new, something that could not be prescribed, was called for. What a pity we do not find it here. Oxford’s ...”

“... National Portrait Gallery foolishly accepted. The Victorians made the Greeks out to have been far more like themselves than they can have been: by now anthropology and sociology have shown how dangerous analogies between their society and ours can be. Indeed, we have gone too far in the opposite direction: anyone who points to a resemblance between Greek ...”

“... he left after a year. Abandonment after a few months of the Army career he had chosen involved more debts to be paid by Allan, who for the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased ...”

“... length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the most strident denials of knowledge have been levelled against the sciences. This, too, goes back to the Greeks, especially to Sextus Empiricus, who, in a work called Adversus Mathematicos, offered ...”