“... forty-eight, we argued all         night about whether a poem was good enough for us. John         Ashbery sat in a corner shelling pistachio nuts;         Robert E. Bly wore a three- piece suit and a striped tie; Kenneth         Koch was always sarcastic. Once as we pasted an issue         together we discovered a ...”

“... information. He was acquitted. Frolik also named a Labour minister, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been recruited in the late 1950s after being compromised by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime ...”

“... always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing ...”

“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... The daughter of a senior politician who has just died, Laura is the wife of an EEC official who ‘took’ her for the dowry of her father’s patronage. He is Catholic, she is Protestant. Her husband’s attentions smother and reduce her, as did her father’s, to doll-like impotence. She hates the closeness of men – aftershave, tobacco and hot licking ...”

“... mistakes. Nor is the culture confined to the Police: on the evidence of the legal hearings which took place, it also infects the judiciary – and there is more than a suspicion that large areas of the legal profession are not immune to it either. This culture of inerrancy, in turn, shifts the focus of police work from detection to deduction – the latter a ...”

“... part of it as a confirmation of social status. His brother Warren, an officer in the RASC, took the same view of the Army. They remained inseparable all their lives, Lewis both accepting and to some extent controlling his brother’s heavy drinking. When he got religion Lewis found himself in an anomalous position, an outsider to the Oxford ...”

“... his career, and ‘on a massive scale’, Glover writes, ‘that would still astonish today’. It took the form of a graceful single arch springing from Southwark Cathedral on the south bank to Angel Lane on the north. As we can see from a wonderful aquatint after Thomas Malton, the artist laureate of the architecture of late Georgian London, ‘it would have ...”

“... to his sister in Rouen to tell her of the evening he had spent with, among others, Victor Hugo: I took pleasure in studying him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my eyes on the right hand ...”

“... II, last of the Spanish Habsburgs: from his dead hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive ...”

“... Three modern biographers have set out to fill the gap. R.H. Super has delivered his book first; N. John Hall’s and Victoria Glendinning’s Trollopes are still to come. Sportingly, Super subtitles his biography ‘A Life’, leaving open the possibility that this may not turn out to be the life. But at least he has the consolation of being first past the ...”

“... that poem is in some ways the centrepiece of Vendler’s book. The trouble is there’s more to John Ashbery than ‘The Painter’, ‘Drunken Americans’ and his other disquisitions on the Reflective Sublime. To compare Vendler’s choice with Ashbery’s, in the invaluable Selected Poems, is to find a troubling divergence. She gives us nothing, for ...”

“... he had all the seriousness and severity of his Evangelical ancestors. He was a pious pagan who took his paganism with a deep reverence, without any touch of hedonism. He felt kinship with Meredith, Shelley and Carlyle because they – Meredith particularly – seemed to him to be pious pagans who had faced the problems of life without religion with a ...”

“... Wolfgang Pauli’s prohibition, ‘Let no man join what God has put asunder’) took place in Dirac’s 1928 paper on the relativistic electron. And from that union has come relativistic quantum field theory, the doppelgänger to particle physics. Particles and fields are different descriptions of the same reality: space is a plenum all ...”

“... merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War of Independence. I know it was 152 feet long, weighed 998 tonnes and carried 42 guns. But at the time this replica was created in 1975, I knew only that it was my dad’s obsession. My brother recalls trips to a timber merchant and a ...”