“... he with this empty trope that he rearranges it several times within the next four pages. Elizabeth Taylor sitting up late at night is presumed to be ‘watching the falling stars with a certain sense of sympathetic identification’, while other guests show contempt on discovering that ‘Jagger, despite the waves of women he had rolled through, could not swim ...”

“... but he recognised their importance. The exhibition includes The Holy Family with the Infant St John, the first drawing by Michelangelo to enter the British Museum’s collection. It is a pity that more is not made of Payne Knight’s other interests and bequests. As the curators of the exhibition point out, the ‘superb quality’ of his collection of ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that ...”

“... to that of an analyst to his patients: cultivated negative capability. But negative capability, as John Bayley has frequently pointed out, cannot, by definition, be cultivated. Absence consciously striven for becomes conspicuous. A Late Divorce has no controlling narrator, but Yehoshua is present on every page of it: as the man performing the vanishing ...”

“... Hopper missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming group of heroes, mumbling geniuses ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...”

“... sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the IRA did in fact embellish the message.’ The peace process, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff is suggesting, began with an ...”

“... trumpet against the yobbo Left; President Clinton bought a copy when he visited Oxford in June, John Patten praised it, the Home Secretary says Selbourne has proved conclusively that Tony Blair cannot turn the Labour Party into a ‘civic’ party, and so, more or less endlessly, on. What has got into editors, politicians and the public? A variety of ...”

“... represented in this book is – and very funny about women’s insistence on the human; Elizabeth Taylor on Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951), remarking that her heroine’s bi-nominal titles can make reading a solicitor on ‘Landlords and Tenants’ an exciting prospect. Infected as one is bound to be by the style of a writer that one admires enough to write ...”

“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”