“... after his early political disappointments, who views concern with this-worldly affairs as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to ‘the cave’? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of our day, and their work exhibits many parallels: but on this deeply political matter they are worlds ...”

“... Branagh. Ambition, that is, not thwarted ambition. In fact Ambition would surely have been the best title for this memoir if Julie Burchill hadn’t gone and beaten him to it. For the characters in Burchill’s little novel, after all, ambition is really nothing more than the sum of their routine material aspirations: but for Branagh, as he portrays ...”

“... artist; which was not how he judged himself. Reportedly he regarded the poems for which he is now best known as mere ‘recreations of his youth’. When he sent them in manuscript to friends or patrons he didn’t always trouble to keep copies. Gradually his mind was taken over by religion. By his mid-thirties he was writing religious verse which has never ...”

“... dignity were a sham: the managers always had the last word, and treated their charges at best as amusing rustics, at worst as ignorant degenerates out of Tobacco Road. Nor did the Collins model produce unfailing harmony between migrants and managers. Ray Mork quarrelled with the campers at Indio in 1939, threatening to throw them out if they did not ...”

“... Galton, who coined the word eugenics (literally, ‘of good descent’) in 1883, devoted the best part of his remarkably productive sixty-year scientific career to the cause. He died in 1911. Guilty by association with the Holocaust, he poses a special challenge to biographers. They may choose to concentrate on his many contributions to non-eugenic ...”

“... they came to have their portraits painted ‘in little’ by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, who lived and worked on Gutter Lane for 35 years. If you were very posh or very rich Hilliard came to you, but his bread and butter was what he called ‘common’ work – in other words, doing portraits of commoners – and this more middling ...”

“... mouse-wouse!’ The Shine screenplay makes the connection for us. Gay piano teacher Ben Rosen (Nicholas Bell), in a scene cut from the film, describes David’s father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), as a ‘poor man’s Leopold Mozart’. Pianospeak, we’re to believe, indicates mental illness. Mozart was insane, according to a playwright too invested in ...”

“... anguish at being deprived of his legacy on his father’s death in 1421. Nonetheless, he had the best education money could buy, first under the leading humanist schoolteacher Gasparino Barzizza between 1416 and 1418 in Padua, where he became familiar with Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, painted a century earlier; many of his ideas about painting were ...”

“... Hope’s fastidious reviews to the scrappy bombast of Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939* makes me wonder for a second why I’m being hesitant about knitting together Hope’s short pieces for a book. And yet, who would want to be remembered for less than his best, and how would Anthony ...”

“... devoutly to be wished. Johnson is not indefatigable compared to Levin, but he is, in the best sense, prosaic. He likes how elections feel, out on the streets. He inhabits the cruddy world of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is ...”

“... the absence from paradise. The words I have just quoted are the last words of the first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s biography of Goethe. The date is June 1790, and other things have been happening in Europe, to which Boyle immediately turns in his new book. Germany at this time was far from a nation state – it was a confusion of duchies and principalities ...”

“... to the lord mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of London: We command you that you have the body of Nicholas Lowe, who is detained in our prison under your custody, as it is said, together with the cause of his detention, by whatever name the aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight ...”

“... Our nightmare of total transparency conflicts with our dream of being entirely known. So we do our best to have it both ways. Hugging our right to silence close to us, we sally forth into the world in search of friends, lovers, therapists. Nagel speaks of intimacy as ‘a partial lifting of the usual veil of reticence’. Friendship and romantic love operate ...”

“... death agony Roussel had ejaculated. (The hotel, according to its website, is still ‘offering the best of service to discerning visitors to Palermo since 1874’.) Perhaps these are trivial matters; except that they were not for Roussel. A person who had believed for so long in his own literary immortality was in the end fearful not so much of dying as of not ...”

“... Hotel, Love Story – which is read by everyone for a while and then sinks into limbo. Have such best-sellers anything in common? Obviously they are not – like War and Peace, say – hardy perennials. Their appeal is to something specific in the temper of the time. Going with that, perhaps, is a capacity to have their cake and eat it, and to give their ...”