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“... For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even Wilde would appear strained next to the Mitfords. The lesson of the girls: it’s not what one says but how one says it. English prose is in love ...”

“... the influence of Martin Amis’s Money. Neither St Aubyn nor his obvious colleague-in-style Alan Hollinghurst is interested in Amis’s jaggy riffs, but here and there the sardonic placement of a perfect, electric adjective or noun, or the ironically self-conscious stoicism of a delicately weighted verb, suggest something of Amis, as in the verb ...”

“... and the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, are barely mentioned, and though the author devotes a page to the Weimar symphonic poems it feels like a hesitant step inside a strange house with one hand firmly on the doorknob. Hilmes is also better on the episode, at first glance bizarre, of Liszt’s spiritual journey to Rome, where he took minor orders, and ...”

“... of social and political habits which can be unsettled and perhaps dislodged by radical work on the page. For some of these ‘elective outsiders’, as Sinclair calls them, quality time at the keyboard is conceived as a challenge to power: the poem is a flamboyant descent into the street, part Pentecost, part June Days – old allegiances among the poets run ...”

“... notably the trials of Lord Montagu, Bill Field (a promising Labour MP) and, most tragically, Alan Turing, the progenitor of modern computing, whose arrest in 1952 precipitated ‘a slow, sad descent into grief and madness’ ending in suicide. Once in jail, homosexuals were often given electric shock treatment and oestrogen to cure them of their ...”

“... that Norman found himself emancipated from washing dishes and fitted (with some difficulty) into a page’s uniform and brought into waiting, where one of his first jobs was predictably to do with the library. Not free the following Wednesday (gymnastics in Nuneaton), the Queen gave Norman her Nancy Mitford to return, telling him that there was apparently a ...”

“... kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought down a president: journalistically, what can beat that? He’s now more famous and must be wealthier than any other ...”

“... It is like an evening spent in a restaurant – let’s say Olwen’s French Club, mentioned on page one, a latterday refuge of the Chelsea set – listening to a story of mutual friends. And it is a trip in its own right, on the teller’s part. T. Behrens gives the impression that he has more to say about himself than the progress of this mad love – to ...”

“... that’s reason enough to include Burroughs, who appears with Göring on the drug’s Wikipedia page, though this hardly suggests the struggle ‘over every little detail’ recorded by Labatut’s acknowledgments page.‘Prussian Blue’ jumps back and forth in time as it weaves together themes of paint and ...”

“... Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five ...”

“... Climate change denial prepared the ground for this.Not everyone found Latour convincing. For Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Impostures intellectuelles (1997), he was merely a dabbler in the sciences. In Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001), Pierre Bourdieu – his most dedicated critic – scolded him for finding ideas more interesting than ...”

“... and paintings. Furthermore Wack has provided eighty pages of little-known Latin text and facing-page translation, thrusting forward the evidence for anyone who wants to argue. And who can argue with the thought that ‘primary sources deserve to be better known’ because they shape the culture’s ‘sexual discourse’? The debate over ‘courtly ...”

“... for the comic-strip version of A la recherche (the first few frames from which are reproduced on page 10). Certainly the French weren’t, as Alan Riding’s recent report in the New York Times suggests. Or some of the French weren’t. The critic in the Figaro thought Stéphane Heuet’s graphic version of ...”

“... of female nakedness – whether imagined or real, as on the moving and perfectly phrased last page of Back – are never lubricious; there’s no sound of the voyeur’s heavy breathing. The Keatsian shyness of Green’s adolescent thoughts about women, as recorded in Pack My Bag, always in some sense remained, even though, as he also says ...”

“... century and earlier. The English were hopeless, a pathetic mixture of incompetence and arrogance. Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward ...”