“... Wittgenstein to John Maynard Keynes:When I saw you last I was confirmed in a view which had arisen in me last term already: you then made it very clear to me that you were tired of my conversation etc. Now please don’t think that I mind that! Why shouldn’t you be tired of me, I don’t believe for a moment that I can be entertaining or interesting to you ...”

“... In John Cheever’s​ Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments ...”

“... of the Bolshevik Autocracy (1952). As a publisher’s reader, he tried to prevent acceptance of John Erickson’s Soviet High Command. In the days of Times Literary Supplement anonymity Carr saw to it that he himself, Isaac Deutscher and, where needed, the wife of the Moscow journalist, Victor Louis, were employed as reviewers. He and Deutscher would ...”

“... flats, rise over East Marsh, hard by Freeman Street. Shoreline, the housing association that took over Grimsby’s council houses in 2005, intends to knock them down. It won’t replace them.The ice factory is still standing, its machinery intact, but the conveyors are rusting, and although English Heritage has given the vast red brick building a Grade ...”

“... on an earlier approach to the unpredictable Charles Townshend, it was William who persuaded Lord John Cavendish to ‘mention us both as fit men to be employed to Lord Rockingham, who received it well’. Edmund got his foot on the ladder not because of his own integrity but because of the lack of integrity which William Burke shared with most politicians of ...”

“... something of a symbol of Canadian independence from America, but scholars from both countries took part in a conference held a few years ago to assess his life and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dissolved the unwieldy COI. A new Office of War Information took over propaganda and everything else went to the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), run by Donovan. With an unlimited, unaudited budget exempt from congressional scrutiny, Donovan’s imagination flourished. He pushed for a 15,000-man commando raid on ...”

“... Conrad and Olga, returned to Paris to live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”

“... of Orgreave, where thousands of police, led by mounted officers, repeatedly charged picketers, took place in June 1984, a few days before the action at Cammell Laird began. The miners’ strike also took up most of Fleet Street’s attention. Albertina, shop steward for the staging department at Cammell Laird, kept track ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... for a few days: the disappearance would allow her to meet a lover in Paris. That conversation took place after my father had died. He had made tyrannical demands of her in his last years, so that his death came to her as a liberation. She could watch television without constantly being interrupted by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... that flourished in Manhattan in the first third of the 20th century. Celebrity caricature took off from and fostered a shared world of famous people affectionately known by their public personas. That club was not one that Groucho Marx refused to join. On the contrary, it supplied the ground for his retort, after Jack Warner threatened a copyright ...”