“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well he, Thomas, had done out of a visit to Peter Watson to touch him for money. ‘I thought that was a ...”

“... the Part and it’s almost a parlour game; a winning combination would be, say, Robert Morley as Andrew Aguecheek. All of which is to do an injustice to Kenneth More, who was a fine naturalistic actor, and although he had never stepped outside his genial public stereotype, Patrick Garland and I both thought that if he could be persuaded to do so, it might ...”

“... In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... a girl looking after a wounded bird.’ The bird flew back to Amherst that autumn. The lesson of Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern’s running mate who dropped out of the 1972 election after it was reported that he’d undergone electroshock therapy, meant Wallace could forget about politics: ‘No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a ...”

“... biographical clues in the articles themselves. When attributing a piece on ‘The Portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, Wu observes that the most obvious clue is the writer’s claim to have ‘seen the author of Thalaba seated beneath just such a rock as disgraces the background of the picture’ painted by Lawrence. Wu then points to a notebook entry by ...”

“... political classes, still constrained by his origins in Arpinum, sixty miles south-east of Rome.Andrew Dyck’s giant volume begins there, with Cicero’s birth in 106 BC, and sticks relentlessly to biographical chronology. It is very much a life – the best in English since Elizabeth Rawson’s fifty years ago – not a life and times. The context of that ...”

“... have been expected to see the mountains on the other side.Two years before Addison took office Thomas Hardy died, and voices were raised in Westminster Abbey, invoking his own invocation of the Wessex countryside:Precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could ...”

“... globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George ...”

“... persuasion: several centuries of debunking patriarchy’s fallacies didn’t prevent the rise of Andrew Tate. They also serve as a reminder of feminism’s own internal tensions. The history of pro-women causes is littered with privileged women kicking down on those with fewer advantages. Perhaps the real feminist value in returning to these early modern ...”

“... media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by Belgian and American business interests. As Thomas Kanza explained a decade later in Conflict in the Congo (1972), the separatists ‘were dependent, ideologically and financially, on the mining companies. Their political motives were dictated by the Europeans who made common cause with them.’ The mining ...”

“... launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance ...”