“... teachers found him ‘quite satisfactory’, but thought he ‘would be better still if he brought more enthusiasm to his work’. He’s quoted in Crap Towns: ‘I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes . . . It’s very nice and flat for cycling.’ Crap Towns lists famous residents, but not famous disparagers. Spike ...”

“... how disproportionate it was, and right, too, that being white is one of the factors that make it more likely your murder will be news (others include being young, female, photogenic and having a name that’s short enough to fit across the front page of a tabloid newspaper). More recently, Blair’s been unfairly attacked ...”

“... book set’, and the Observer has said that, ‘as literary festivals go, Port Eliot could not be more rock’n’roll if it tried.’ The telling phrase here of course being ‘as literary festivals go’, since, let’s face it, writers aren’t popstars, however much some of them would like to be, and publishing isn’t rock’n’roll. Twenty years ...”

“... in the medieval Umbrian town of Orvieto every autumn since 1996. Spasso is an Italian noun that more or less corresponds to the English ‘leisure’. Andare a spasso is ‘to go for a walk’; essere a spasso is ‘to be out of work’: mandare qualcuno a spasso is ‘to give someone the sack’, not to send them out for a stroll. Gusto means ...”

“... and Where They Came From by André Bernard (Norton, $19.95). Literary models don’t get much more famous than the Delamare case: in that (obvious) sense, the pronouncement of Flaubert’s which Bernard takes for his title is transparently absurd. In another (no less obvious) sense, however, Flaubert couldn’t be ...”

“... biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20). How, even supposing a ‘biography’ of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George ...”

“... bench as Labour’s Spokesman on Trade and Industry, he said in an LRB Diary: ‘There is nothing more ridiculous than the notion that socialism is inexorably dying . . . The world we face today makes a socialist approach all the more relevant . . . The 1990s will not see the continuing triumph of the market, but its ...”

“... somebody resting from a difficult job of labour.’ This is another loss of innocence, altogether more private than the death of the president, and altogether more real. Houston ‘felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was 18 years old.’ Later ...”

“... A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the point of pretending that his poem is a good one if it is not? But can the same honesty be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant ...”

“... And as a result, everybody treated me like someone they could talk to.Journalistically, what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the ...”

“... commented that it sounded much like the writing of Gertrude Stein. Quite so; and how much more difficult it must be to recapture the character of talk before the 20th century. Most of the contributors to Mr Quennell’s volume grope around the problem and then turn to something else more tangible. Hilde Spiel writes ...”

“... that the appetite for reality TV on this side of the Atlantic has abated. Big Brother 4 received more applications than any of its predessors. The Sun – which, just when you think it can’t get any tawdrier, will pull another grubby hanky from its sleeve – has proffered a bounty of £50,000 to the first (straight) couple to have sex on the show. That ...”

“... McCain Bill, it’s now illegal for Americans to commit torture anywhere in the world: all the more reason to outsource it. Thanks to the heroic drudgery of a number of planespotters, there is documented evidence that these flights stop over in Britain. It makes you wonder if those planespotters who got into trouble in Greece a few years ago were arrested ...”

“... missing’. This is in apparent contradiction to Newcomb’s preface, where she writes: ‘The more I discovered about angels, I realised the less I actually knew about them.’ In answer to the frequently asked question whether or not they are ‘the messengers of God as the Bible claimed’, Newcomb says that ‘one of the translations of Angel is ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”