“... elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly ...”

“... years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still ...”

“... the century for scholars preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in ...”

“... all Soviet aid to the so-called Third World. And now there is Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope, a distinguished prison memoir. At one stage in his long imprisonment, Valladares enjoyed conversations with Pierre Golendorf, a disillusioned French Marxist spending some time in jail for writing imprudent letters home: ‘It’s true, Valladares, most of ...”

“... They might travel in companies, like Chaucer’s fun-loving band on the road to Canterbury – or hope to escape with their lives from the bandits who haunted mountainous pilgrim routes. They might themselves be armed, for no distinction was made at the time between pilgrims and crusaders. Most shrines kept records of their miracles, and so left behind ...”

“... angels enter the story rather late, but grow quickly in attentiveness and popularity. Christopher Smart trusted that ‘my Angel is always ready at a pinch to help me out and to keep me up.’ They could give domestic help: Gemma Galgani, who died in 1903, was brought coffee by her guardian angel when she was ill, which she frequently was. Pope ...”

“... genuinely independent Cabinet deriving its authority from an elected parliament. The only possible hope of getting the Emperor to do so was to mobilise pressure in influential Western circles to persuade the paranoid old ruler to prepare for the post-imperial age which was close at hand. The idea was that I should approach the Emperor with a set of ...”

“... as a teacher in an FE college and became a bookseller myself. A subsidiary motive for this was the hope that it would make me less acquisitive if I was buying books in order to sell them, not keep them. I spent most of my thirties in that world, accumulating a large and somewhat specialised stock in my basement (modernism, left-wingery, the Spanish Civil ...”

“... zenith. It ended on a downbeat note: ‘Most of the world is passing through bad times, but … hope itself cannot be abandoned.’ Yet much of the preceding narrative was about Ali’s involvement in radical struggles that either succeeded or, for a time at least, felt promising and thrilling. He described flying into a bombed and blacked-out Hanoi to ...”

“... as far as we know he didn’t regularly attend a church. It is fair enough to describe him, as Christopher Hill did, as a radical Protestant heretic; but while Milton’s heterodoxy has become more widely acknowledged among scholars in recent years, there is still a good deal of confusion as to what it does and does not mean. ‘Orthodox’ and ...”

“... throughout his career. Start with ‘content’. I believe the next train is for Manchester, and I hope there will be a seat available. Philosophers like to say that these states – belief and hope – exhibit ‘intentionality’, which is a fancy way of saying that they are about certain things. But ...”

“... I’m more often than not completely baffled by his music . . . I persevere – but have little hope of catching up with any of them. All rather depressing.’ There was little love lost the other way round, as I can vouch from personal knowledge. ‘Arse over tippett’ was not, I think, forgiven, nor Walton’s campaign, provoked by the success of Britten ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 January. Wake this morning thinking of a line that I’ve always remembered Burt Lancaster delivering in a costume drama. Caught out after curfew, he says: ‘I am apothecary Manzoni on an errand of mercy ...”

“... of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial reading’ of Eliot’s work. I say ‘another repudiation’ advisedly, because Julius’s book was rejected by Oxford University Press on the ...”