“... then, going back almost to the beginning, there was the matter of those initials on the dedication page of The City and the Pillar. This homoerotic drama, Vidal’s second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was one ‘J.T.’ Just a few feet away from that marble slab in Rock Creek, one can discover a small grey stone ...”

“... familiar idiom, one of ‘the less deceived’. Even though we haven’t even got to the contents page, we’re starting to catch a whiff of the ‘no bullshit’ bullshit that is one of Hitchens’s trademarks. The epigraph is from Proust and, being from Proust, is a paragraph long. It is about one kind of genius, genius as ‘reflecting power’, the kind ...”

“... his context, is that of a point of departure: art is an escape, a flight of speech to the printed page, where the reader’s imagination is free to encounter the writer’s; biography moves in the opposite direction, dissolving text back into conversation, returning the writer to his ‘household’, reincarnating his family, bringing him back to earth. The ...”

“... up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from Aboriginal languages as well as modern verse in English by poets from a range of racial ...”

“... Sutherland and Marilyn Horne during the rehearsals for Norma? What about June Anderson? And Jessye Norman? Or Lucia Popp, for that matter? (‘Of course, Terry, the perfect Queen of the Night.’) Did I think Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had had an affair? What was Adrienne Rich’s girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora ...”

“... periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ‘of the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict’, and in the Nation Alexander Cockburn has called it ‘From Lies Immemorial’.Joan Peters puts forward the following case: the Jews ...”

“... to exercise a sortes Hitlerianae by opening at random a copy of Mein Kampf: ‘There isn’t a page that isn’t well-written.’ As chance would have it, the copy fell open at a shriek against the Jews. At other times he laid claim to Jewish blood – tempering the true-blue Boston Brahmin birthright which conferred, as he sometimes felt, the first-class ...”

“... made, every line won hard, and it is sad and comforting at one and the same time. But 1 and 2 on page 47’ – ‘Fox-Fur’ and ‘The Messiah’ – ‘will tear Elizabeth apart.’)In March 1972, Bishop wrote to Lowell carefully setting out the argument against publishing the poems. She began by praising them: ‘It’s hell to write this, for please ...”

“... Self-Consciousness (1989), he seemed to defy age and attrition, remaining nimble and smooth on the page, his brain a well-oiled Leica. With the exception of the still generative Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent pen-pal in the letters (and presiding grande dame of X, garrotting Elon Musk with brisk dispatch), Updike’s productivity was unmatched among his ...”

“... increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum ...”

“... Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s 36-page notebook containing his theories on fossils, astronomy and much else, was kept, during her childhood, in a safe in the butler’s pantry, from where, every couple of weeks, Glenconner used to get it out, ‘lick my finger and spin through the pages … with ...”

“... all involved in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and eventually became ...”

“... Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John Stevas between 1965 and 1986. Prochaska chose to present Bagehot in the first person ‘because I thought Bagehot could speak more vividly of his life and mind than I could as an intermediary in a conventional biography’. I rather sympathise with ...”

“... have acquired a more general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own and his political viewpoint not in the forefront, but the new breed of historian – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone ...”

“... world – prostitutes – are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art. Norman Mailer has said that there won’t be a really great woman writer – one, you understand, con cojones and everything – until the first call-girl tells her story. Though it’s reasonable to assume that, when she does, Mailer won’t like it at all, the ...”