“... know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know. In a good novel facts will seem incidental. Tolstoy gives us a picture of life on the Napoleonic battlefield no history book can compete with, but this isn’t because of the information that War and Peace contains. Even ...”

“... in ‘East Coker’. Two years later the familiar compound ghost of ‘Little Gidding’ was even more downbeat: Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fly ...”

“... first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later. Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking. Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer and he has got what he wanted. He early acquired a habit of vigilance, of stopping ...”

“... the Bush team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and Russia,’ Thomas Friedman grumbled in the New York Times, ‘but why shove that in their faces while we’re asking them to forgive Iraq’s debts?’ Or was the Wolfowitz directive a bargaining chip placed on the table as part of Baker’s negotiating strategy? Are the ...”

“... near the River Congo, with small brick houses set along avenues bordered by mango trees; it housed more than a thousand leprosy patients. There was no segregation of the ‘lepers’, a cruel and unnecessary measure meant to prevent the transmission of the disease. Leprosy is not particularly contagious, and out of some 100,000 patients at the time in the ...”

“... McCartney, the leader of the short-lived UK Unionist Party, which wanted a Northern Ireland more completely integrated with Great Britain, once complained that Paisley was a pseudo-unionist whose real aim was to make Ulster a ‘mini-Geneva, run by a fifth-rate Calvin’. Certainly, the DUP, founded in 1971, began as a postscript to an ecclesiastical ...”

“... times’ sake, we could just recite again some morsels from the Sun’s coverage of a war in which more than a thousand people died. It was the paper that celebrated the torpedoing of a ship carrying 1,200 men with the headline ‘GOTCHA.’ It was the paper that paid £5 (plus a can of non-Argentine corned beef) for every ‘anti-Argie’ joke sent in by ...”

“... premature. The last issue of transition appeared in 1938, five years after the Autobiography, and more than sixty years later it still means a great deal. Of all the little reviews which, as Stein loved to say, ‘died to make verse free’, transition is one of the very few to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially ...”

“... by the litigants, who will be appearing before them. Recusal in such states is going to require more than the occasional dollar in the judicial collecting tin.* Would it matter if the same judge had in other cases found against the company that had sponsored his campaign? The risk of bias is not limited to favouritism. There is an equal and opposite risk ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said about him (‘It is his fault if we stare,’ H.W. Garrod said testily in an Oxford lecture on Housman in 1929), and the life was measured out in anecdotes, captured in memoirs, diaries and letters, preserved in the aspic of college rumour, handed ...”

“... its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so ...”

“... was long-lasting and apparently complete. Whether the main body of the Parliamentary cause was more successful, or whether the heirs of Pym and Hampden were equally defeated, is a different question, and one to be discussed later. Those Mr Hill recognises as defeated produced a multiplicity of explanations of their failure. Among all the explanations, two ...”

“... Syphilis and the League of Nations have more in common than you might think. Both were dumped into the dustbin of history in the 1940s: syphilis by penicillin, the League of Nations by the Second World War. But the connection goes further than chronological coincidence. Before the war, the League took a deep and direct interest in syphilis, with its Health Organisation arranging conferences on the laboratory diagnosis of the disease ...”

“... All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler ...”