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“... pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline. Gavin L. is en route for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must be quite old now. ‘Yes,’ says Gavin, ‘82.’ ‘That’s not so old,’ says Lindsay. ‘Well it’s a funny age, 82,’ says Gavin. ‘I’ve known several people of 82 who haven’t made it to 83.’ I don’t think ...”

“... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...”

“... that he stand back to form a full picture. It is instructive to compare him in this respect to Paul Veyne – another outstanding writer on ancient history, and like Finley steeped in modern social theory. In one of his insightful asides, Finley writes that ‘we might consider the Pont du Gard as a fantastically expensive way of bringing fresh water to a ...”

“... and colleague, John Chilton, has proved conclusively that although the great Blues singer Bessie Smith died following a car accident, it was not because she was refused treatment by a white Southern hospital – a version that is still widely and emotionally cited. I have already read several reviews and articles which, while accepting perforce that Madame ...”

“... of P&S slightly. Now there is room to show greats like Picasso struggle, and less-greats like Paul Signac shine. (The decision to begin with his wild Neo-Impressionist portrait of the debonair critic Félix Fénéon caused much consternation: that’s how fetishised the presentation had become.) One effect is to ease the expectation that every work be ...”

“... a harsh reassessment. Carlyle had earlier translated the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally ...”

“... with your mum and dad in Essex. I bought a Bible, obviously – a Good News Bible, from W.H. Smith in Romford, the only bookshop I’d ever been to. I had no idea there were such things as bookshops that just sold books and not also, say, a full range of stationery items and cards for all occasions. My Good News Bible was translated from the original ...”

“... not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter – about Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929 – and wasn’t especially good on the philosophy. Misak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, draws on extensive archival ...”

“... In 1864, he won a Snell Exhibition, which had sent many brilliant students – not least Adam Smith – from Glasgow University to Balliol College, Oxford. The high churchmanship of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop ...”

“... in order to dispel the anthropological premise of modern economics: ‘the myth of barter’. Adam Smith supposed – as primers on economics complacently repeat – that economic life emerged from a propensity of the species to truck and barter. The Wealth of Nations imagines ‘a tribe of hunters or shepherds’ among whom producers of arrowheads, tanned ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... It was only when Jim McCann, ex-Belfast bomber, current film financier, introduced him to Jean-Paul Belmondo, that his palms started to get clammy. ‘Jean-Paul, let me introduce you to Mark Thatcher, just back from Saudi Arabia.’ A few stiff drinks in the Paris nightclub and he carried it off – until Roman Polanski ...”

“... occasionally to be seen: reproductions on board of work by modern British painters – Ravilious, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Pasmore. These, I think, were put out by Shell and turn up occasionally nowadays at auction, though not quite at Sotheby’s. That I’ve always liked – and found no effort in liking – British paintings of the Forties and Fifties I ...”

“... the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”

“... said, his greatness and his doom indistinguishable. It reads more like art than life, but then as Paul Delany reminded us in a recent article in this journal (24 January), life ‘too is “written” – shaped, selected, mythologised – by the same rules that govern the creation of literary texts’. Here, each of the countless fragments of memory out of ...”