“... writing’. No one, except Amis’s heroes Nabokov and Bellow, is exempt from censure. Angus Wilson, who gets a bit of a drubbing, was capable of writing ‘the admirable Admiral Croft’ and ‘a revolting revolutionary act’. V.S. Pritchett, for whom Amis has a well-considered and affectionate admiration (expressed with less qualification in an ...”

“... Monday night till Friday morning. Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a ...”

“... on Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential ...”

“... to say, he is most at ease with the thinkers and legislators who abhorred the practice. In 1613 James I issued a Proclamation prohibiting the publishing of reports or writing on duels and appointed Francis Bacon as attorney general, inviting him to put a stop to the practice. Bacon described the duel as a brutal urge for revenge dressed up in Italian ...”

“... in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his Marxist phase, of falling ‘into a supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes ...”

“... collaborators) that he declared he was giving up theatre to write mystery novels. He rallied after James Lapine, a new collaborator, suggested doing something about Seurat and his painting of a Sunday afternoon at la Grande Jatte. That show ran for 604 performances, yet its ten Tony nominations led only to design prizes – there really is a Broadway faction ...”

“... a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and ...”

“... part of the reason her singing speaks to us so deeply is the pain in her voice. After her death, James Mason, her co-star in A Star Is Born, said that she gave so much of herself on stage and screen there was ‘no currency in which to repay her’. One of her favourite currencies seems to have been applause, and after MGM dropped her, singing on stage ...”

“... the ballot box’ to determine whether Britain should join. After winning the election, Harold Wilson renegotiated Heath’s terms of entry, then put the deal before the electorate in a referendum in 1975. His appeal to popular sovereignty immediately generated a distinctive kind of non-parliamentary politics. While the prime minister campaigned for a yes ...”

“... throne was the second major misfortune of her life. (Her brother’s death was the first.) When James II fled to France in 1688 she followed his court into exile in St Germaine-en-Laye, just outside Paris. She wasn’t an aristocrat like those other royalists Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, she was ‘an ...”

“... And if I do so, it is because my version of events has a relevance to the immediate past when James Callaghan agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a ...”

“... Later in the book, describing a weekend journey to the countryside to meet his new amanuensis, James Adams, Neil gives a pretty clear idea of how he likes to see himself: ‘James,’ Neil writes, ‘was surprised when somebody his own age emerged one sunny Sunday in shorts and open-necked shirt from a black convertible ...”

“... His present-day biographer inherits a tradition of controversy dating back a full hundred years. James Anthony Froude, the first of the succession, had been Carlyle’s friend and disciple for thirty years, and it was to him that Carlyle entrusted the keeping of his posthumous fame. As he worked over his master’s papers, Froude never forgot his ...”

“... of pen-portraits, beginning with his corpse-side meditations on the death of his artisan father James (‘the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise’) in 1832 and of Jane 34 years later, taking in her early admirers Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey, and winding up with more controlled recollections of Wordsworth, Southey, ‘Christopher North’ (John ...”

“... History of England. An unattributed notice in the London Chronicle which praised a work by James Boswell as ‘a book of true genius’ was written by Boswell himself. John Wilson wrote an anonymous letter to Blackwood’s Magazine robustly defending Wordsworth from some unsigned criticism in a previous issue of the ...”