“... curiosity. The generic description for such people is ‘bedint’, a term borrowed from Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West; meaning, I suppose, someone who serves, whose manners are appropriate to a subordinate station. They might be ‘Liverpool Geordies’ (it’s hard to tell one bedint from another) or educated at a redbrick university, in ...”

“... of press omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the ...”

“... Mitford, with whom he had been at school, and Tom’s sister Diana, with whom he was for years in love. He remained bisexual for most of his life. A further episode of doubtful veracity in Another Self, according to Bloch, is Lees-Milne’s account of falling into conversation with a young man he met at the opera. In the memoir they share an idyllic evening ...”

“... have two aims, truth and virtue. In Plato these are somehow one, in the powerful sense that the love of truth and the love of virtue are identical. The contrast between states of illusion (selfish habits or egoistic fantasy) and honest clarified truthful serious thinking suggests a moral picture of the mind in a ...”

“... his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that ...”

“... so she follows anyone. A dog. She doesn’t know a goddam thing she’s too scared to know what love is she has no idea what money is she runs away from anyone so anything she’s writing is just un-knowledge.Conveniently, the clip stops just there, before the next bit, which is:Plus she doesn’t have the guts to entertain an audience. She should put lots ...”

“... their Jews as propagators of the enemy language. From the age of the Enlightenment, the Jewish love-affair with German thought and literature, though sometimes reciprocated, was more often scorned and ridiculed by the writers in whose culture they sought their secular salvation. Of the monstrous irony of this predicament Professor Mayer says not a word ...”

“... an irresistible period piece – brimming with Freud’s ‘honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women’. And of course the photo speaks to the Kline connection. Kline and the woman on the left with her back to the viewer are Suburb in Havana’s imagined audience.) The critic Tom Hess says that Suburb in Havana was in the Janis show, but most ...”

“... New York the previous year Auden had sometimes been in tears, telling Isherwood no one would ever love him and that he would never have any sexual success. True to form on this second visit it was Isherwood who already had a date lined up: Vernon, ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body ...”

“... His T.S. Eliot Lecture that year widened the definition to include chicken-soup anthologisers, Harold Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By trying to make poetry ‘accessible’, the popularisers flatter the poet into thinking deep feelings are ...”

“... Lord, Joseph – he’ll hear us – he’ll help us – he’ll comfort us in our time of need, love – he will.” “That’s what I want, to deliver myself up to the Lord.” Then my Mrs said, “Now Joseph, you’re easier – you’re comforted – are you not Joseph?” and he answered, “Yes.” ’ But Anne Lister’s writing has a quality not ...”

“... about wildly for information, however inconsequential, that might spark a reader’s interest. ‘Harold and Virginia Knapik, as it turned out, were undercover CIA. Another unusual thing about them is that they were first cousins – his brother was married to her sister.’ Not only irrelevant but nonsense – that’s not what constitutes first ...”

“... writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That ...”

“... formed Communist group march by, I saw in the middle of the marchers a barman whom I had grown to love for his winning smile and general meekness. His fist was raised; he was roaring out some radical slogan. He was not simply looking for better wages for barmen, but wanted, it seemed, something new for all mankind. Another night, as I wandered in the Plaza ...”

“... housing than others,’ she wrote, inelegantly but sincerely, in her autobiography. People who love her in spite of her stance on grammar schools rather than because of it, are in love with a particular vision of her, and not with her politics. So if her popularity wasn’t based on her political achievements or her ...”