“... it tends to make their characters pretty angry. Made to suffer cancer, Christie Malry warns B.S. Johnson that he will look stupid when they discover a cure, and anyway, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim ...”

“... Rhondda and took nearly half the seats in the Senedd. In London, Sadiq Khan exceeded both of Boris Johnson’s mayoral victories, in vote share as well as final margin of victory. There were also positive micro stories: Labour made gains in southern coastal towns such as Worthing, university towns such as Falmouth and commuter-belt towns around London; the ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought that they showed ‘a sensible heart’, but that you ...”

“... which willy-nilly drove this forward, in the long run did the party more harm than good. David Cameron is almost certainly aware of this but clearly isn’t sure what he can do about it. Once again, the problem is likely to be solved – to the extent that it can be – by accumulating error on the government’s part. The Tories just have to make ...”

“... found it in themselves to think afterwards that they had a whale of a time in the trenches. As Dr Johnson said of foxhunting, it is a very strange and very melancholy thought that the paucity of human pleasures is such as to make us feel that warfare is one of them. The fact cannot be gainsaid, none the less. Johnson also ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel ...”

“... pairing of Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone ...”

“... One of the most prominent supporters of estate tax repeal was the African-American billionaire Bob Johnson, who ran a series of newspaper ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry ...”

“... as austerity and self-denial, those old-fashioned Protestant virtues, succumbed to what Samuel Johnson extolled as the ‘innocent pleasures’ of money-making. Acquisitive ‘passions’ previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as ‘interests’, while ‘self-love’, that perennial target of Christian moralising, was vindicated as a ...”

“... benefit of Miss Merton (who is, however, familiar with the Italian of the Divine Comedy).Samuel Johnson observed of the humanist scholar George Buchanan that his writing ‘has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern Latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits’. Such an opposition might be ...”

“... by reining in the FBI. By October the scandal was swirling around Baker’s former boss, Lyndon Johnson, who was under Senate investigation for his involvement in Baker’s business affairs. ‘Hill Probe May Take Profumo-like Twist’ was one headline that ran in the Washington Post. What killed the story was the assassination of JFK, which gave everyone ...”

“... poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so – and this without much ...”