“... like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ‘an inside guy at the skunk works’. Unfortunately, Harvie is an intellectual magpie and his book is irritatingly, or rather maddeningly, written, a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to ...”

“... collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he is quite often doing ...”

“... Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said ...”

“... like the autobiography of, say, Simone de Beauvoir. If you read it expecting anything very frank or deep or sustained, you will find it, as I did to begin with, disappointing. But unlike John Henry Newman, Muriel Spark is not a priest but an artist, and so does not need to apologise to anybody for her life. And unlike, say. Simone de Beauvoir, Muriel ...”

“... him a man with no credentials in science. Wolcot, the lampoonist, who wrote under the name of Peter Pindar, was probably not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he ...”

“... public now has access to this side of Kierkegaard for the first time. Kierkegaard’s brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard, later Bishop of Aalborg, was obviously much disliked by him. The letters he writes to him are from the beginning stiff, awkward, defensive, and show strong marks of an inferiority complex. ...”

“... personal life (as an adult, anyway) or the relationship between work and family. Inglis is frank about this. ‘Recreating the necessarily private magnificence of the Hoggarts’ family life is impossible to me,’ he writes. ‘I don’t know enough and I haven’t the talent. But its actuality cannot be doubted.’ There is a contrast here with ...”

“... force, and the Thatcherites were troubled by the ongoing costs of a fortified, garrisoned Ulster. Peter Brooke, who became Northern Ireland secretary in 1989, initiated the tortuously slow pavane that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with a speech in November 1990 in which he announced that ‘the British government has no selfish strategic or ...”

“... early forties, she determined to break free, so she hooked up with a guy sixteen years her junior, Frank Perry, who wanted to be a film director. They had a few years of activity together in the 1960s. She wrote and he directed: David and Lisa, The Swimmer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. They were in the money and the awards, and they were married. Joan ...”

“... back, the noticeboard was taken down. That noticeboard is behind a poem ‘Spot the ball’ which Frank Ormsby wrote in the Seventies: We persevere from habit. When we try These days our hope’s mechanical, we trust To accident. We are selective No longer, the full hundred crosses Filling the sky. It was Craig Raine who pointed out that this is a poem ...”

“... in English sexual culture. Clearly, the notion of women – as opposed to men – being completely frank about sex, whether as the basic structural idea of the book, or as its leading theme at this important juncture, would not be erotically interesting unless a greater reticence about sex prevailed, or was expected to prevail, among women in Cleland’s ...”

“... In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded ...”

“... wake of 1816, the ‘year without a summer’, wasn’t just the spectre of a non-redemptive, St Peter-less and faith-free apocalypse, but the question of what kind of meaning life has in a future with nobody in it. Today’s narratives of climate change and pandemic – which have themselves displaced previous generations’ anxieties about the Bomb – are ...”

“... such ... as to appear almost as a nervous “surrealism”’. ‘The American Poet’s Visit’, Frank Moorhouse’s funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came ...”

“... and in the First World War cemeteries at Thiepval and Etaples, that the Lutyens admired by Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Behrens and even Le Corbusier can be discerned. It is here, too, that the links to Lutyens’s masters Norman Shaw and Philip Webb appear, not in literal borrowings but in their shared toughness of ...”