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“... clearly she could. When he writes ‘this far’, I am dead sure that ‘this’ is not an adverb. Self-contradictorily, however, he seems to believe that a word cannot be an adverb unless it ends in -ly. There seems no other reason for him to write ‘overly’, a North American usage I always find overly ripe. Stylistically, he is at his most infuriating ...”

“... ineffectiveness was partly caused by ineffective leaders. Where was the Labor equivalent of Sir Robert Menzies – a man of great physical presence and even greater political cunning? The answer, when it finally came, was Gough Whitlam. He was a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely ...”

“... dissection of their arguments, his unsparing determination to catch them out, as he often does, in self-contradiction, grants their thinking more respectful attention than it deserves. On the evidence amassed here, Woolf’s own dismissive contempt – ‘I cant conceive how anybody can be fool enough to believe in a doctor,’ she wrote to Violet Dickinson in ...”

“... seeking to identify the influences that shaped a body of literature come equipped with a self-destruct mechanism in the form of two beguiling but potentially compromising accomplices, the companion fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and the single cause. It may be merely a coincidence, after all, that it was only after the dissemination of ...”

“... occurs. All women like it, this theory insists, and those who say they don’t are hypocrites, or self-deceived, or so weird or old they don’t count. Sometimes this notion is accompanied by the belief that all women like to be roughed up. There is a tiny kernel of truth in these monstrous falsifications. Women, like men, have been known to say ‘no’ when ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... to collide with the inflammable main story, discreetly averting her gaze while the whole thing self-destructs. As if she hadn’t done enough already, talkshow host Jack Python choppers down to ravish the divine Jade from the very brink of nuptiality while her husband-to-have-been, the gutless Lord Mark Rand, gnashes his titled English gums ...”

“... an artist without understanding his relationship to Diego, yet Lord is – with the exception of Robert Wernick – the first writer on him to do justice to that subject. He delineates subtly and accurately the relationship they seemed to have when one knew them, in middle age and onwards. And he unearths events and habits in their childhood and youth which ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... for good. ‘The promotion I earned that summer, from axeman to rodman, had done more for my self-esteem than any number of inherited titles.’ The matter of inherited titles is an important one in George Ignatieff’s book, as is the family tradition of public service which got the Ignatieffs their estates and their title. His ...”

“... able to explain the gradual mutation of the expectant city of the mid-Seventies into the mediocre, self-conscious city of the end of the decade.’ This is a complaint often made about Barcelona: as long as Franco was alive, it was a centre of resistance, radical, cosmopolitan, connected to Europe when the rest of Spain was not. When Franco died, in ...”

“... finance: namely, that the monarch became a taxpayer. In 1842, the then Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reintroduced income tax, which had previously been levied on a temporary basis during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Queen was determined – or advised, the documentation is incomplete – that ‘her own income should be subject to a ...”

“... and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to call Oates’s walk into the snow ‘fruitless’ is to declare oneself a member of the postwar generation. Until the Fifties ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... Rego sat at the back of the class and painted from her imagination. ‘Of course one becomes very self-conscious at art school,’ she told her son hesitantly during an interview in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an intellectual, the restricted way of teaching in those days – the Euston Road method, which I could not do. You lose your – it’s not ...”