“... could have flung himself more determinedly into the milieu, and identified more with that almost gay, charmed, doomed circle – Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Peter Taylor. They are written about not as authors but as friends, or, like Eliot and John Crowe Ransom, avuncular elders to be lovingly gossiped ...”

“... Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the term ‘gay’ wasn’t used then), though I can’t recall just how that information was conveyed to me. There was nothing of the pansy (a contemporary term he employed to describe a type he despised) about him. He had come up intending to edit Isis, as I had, but he ...”

“... by a scholar leans towards ‘the Muse’ and away from the facts of History. There is a sense (as Peter Ackroyd cogently observed in his Life of Eliot) in which every literary biography is something of a tightrope-walk between these two poles: a sense in which, that is, all biographies are really re-interpretations on the part of each individual biographer of ...”

“... all return after the revolution, when automation has eliminated drudgery and we shall live as Peter Pans in paradise. It’s the totality for ‘kids’ because children already know life without boredom, constraints, separation – some of the time at least, mostly when they’re at play rather than detained in school. ‘There are no limits to ...”

“... near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... and flat, Vulcan-like affect, usually tops the list. Last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told an audience that in the current economy people ‘who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage’ because they’re more likely to fall prey to caution, complacency and the conventional wisdom of the crowd. It​ isn’t ...”

“... Party’s mixture of technocratic slogans and gestures to identity-based interest groups (gay marriage, abortion rights, immigration reform), topped off by the Democrats’ own version of imperial grandiosity. The intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party is nowhere more evident than in the looming presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... they are barristers, solicitors, philosophers or retired miners, or whether they are lesbians or gay, or black or white. The objection is to the idea of such power, not merely to the class or gender or race of those who would exercise it. It is the business of judges to uphold the law, not to subvert it for moral gain. We should not ask judges to be proxy ...”

“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... female-to-male transsexuals get their stubby new little tubercules, they instantly want to become gay men.The problem with Bev’s Taurus is no CD player, so I had unplugged my office boom box, crammed it with six new giant batteries and brought it along too. In addition to all the jazz stuff – Bird, Dexter, Dizzy, Sonny, Miles, Ornette, Dolphy, the ...”

“... If Jesus himself were one of his characters, there he would be, centre-forward and listening to Peter Gabriel, carrying his coffee cup to the sink. Being ‘closely bound to the moment’ is a paradisiacal state, as Egil explains. We are certainly that. The moment, according to Kierkegaard, was ‘the very gateway to the Kingdom of God’. So Knausgaard’s ...”

“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly ...”