“... only when one reflected on the conditions of squalor, poverty and oppression in which much of it took place. After 1975, when ‘child abuse’ came increasingly to mean sexual abuse, it was entangled with the two ancient themes of incest and innocence. The old doctrine of childish innocence (‘suffer the little children to come unto me’) plus the late ...”

“... last photograph. The explanation for that change does not lie in the years during which it took place. To account for it, Mrs Tynan had to go back to the beginning: to the indulged Birmingham schoolboy who was always to maintain that he really was born on his first day at Oxford. The time to which Ken Tynan bore a symbolic relation was the ...”

“... even been sent over to that very same mental-institution. He had seen the film before; then he took Brenda to it and behaved throughout with odious aggression; and then, after killing the gas-station attendant, he took half-crazy April to it: ‘This is one movie I want to see again.’ Skilled, unscrupulous, the film ...”

“... than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on art of the past half-century. The ...”

“... as I Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the fortunes of the benandanti through a series of Inquisition trials from 1575, when they first appear in the records, until 1676, when both they and the witches had ceased to be of much interest to the Church ...”

“... from which he realised that the cure for his condition was regular intercourse. But it took two consultations with Lallemand in Paris before the young man’s ‘insuperable bashfulness’ about adopting this remedy was overcome. He then embarked on a programme of ‘preventive intercourse’, starting moderately at ‘only once a week’. Despite ...”

“... the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of ...”

“... published in Colombo in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing; a book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair ...”

“... the affectations of traditional high culture (it may have helped that his education and career took place entirely outside Oxbridge). Though his fiction is minutely observed and in that respect faithful to the conventions of traditional English social comedy, Lodge writes from a perspective that has been freed from inherited class associations as much by ...”

“... One reason for Thatcher’s eluding wasmification is that the Labour ministers who eventually took over after her fall were in awe of her and keen to do her will. Her Tory successors have been regarded as cruder Thatcherites than Thatcher, but have possibly been more successful than her in dishing the welfare state. Less shrill than their mentor, they did ...”

“... counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, so well developed is the tradition of denigrating women thought to exercise influence from behind the ...”

“... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem ...”

“... to keep a married couple ‘on their feet’. Conveniently for him. At the time, Comfort took pride in his arrangement, which persisted for more than a decade. Not until 1994 did he admit to a journalist that ‘it didn’t work very well,’ and that both women were ‘in eruption the whole time’. Even this frankness had repercussions: Henderson ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”