“... it said. ‘There’s nobody who doesn’t resent doing other people’s washing-up.’ When Karl Miller saw the sign, he laughed and asked whether she was responsible for its ‘Johnsonian cadences’. If you want a manifesto of an editor’s style, just read those sentences again. In them you will find the LRB’s ideal ...”

“... opened in the last eighteen months, will reduce or end the overcrowding by the end of the decade. Andrew Rutherford, chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, advocates a vastly different approach to imprisonment and the prison system as a whole. In both Prisons and the Process of Justice and Growing out of Crime he argues against the ever-expanding ...”

“... preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared later that year in a chart buried at the back of the December issue of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report. The figure was the size of ...”

“... provide occasions for displays of making do, rising above, staying young, absorbing shock. When Andrew Hawkins, in For Love Alone, reminds his grown-up daughters that he has been loved by women for being ‘the good-looking, sincere young idealist’, Teresa responds sceptically and scornfully. An intransigent refusal to be gulled destroys Henny Pollitt in ...”

“... to pretend they were moderates, and to give the biggest speaking slots to Republicans (and Zell Miller, a Democrat) who hold views quite opposite to those of George W. Bush on most matters to do with social policy, but not on matters to do with 11 September and the War on Terror. So we had the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani presenting himself as a ...”

“... been discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently unassailable Tory stronghold ...”

“... lunch in the Twentieth Century Fox commissary. She passed on greetings from her husband, Arthur Miller, and later said: ‘he looked at me the way a man looks on a woman.’ The studio head Spyros Skouras took Khrushchev on with an argument about capitalism. Judy Garland wanted more drinks. Elizabeth Taylor said she wouldn’t have missed it for ...”

“... no romantic fool, but no one would deny that he is a romantic player. The former Wallaby captain Andrew Slack has spoken of the ‘free-spirit driver’ associated with him, and he tells his readers a hundred times in his book about how free his spirit is. He is a loner and an owner, in a team game. The romantic runs with the ball. When push comes to ...”

“... writes, took the peroxide bottle to her pubic hair and never washed her sheets; meanwhile, Arthur Miller hid away in his study pretending to write a play in order to avoid his wife’s demands for arguments, babies and pizza. Rough stuff, but not that rough when compared to some of the more recent semi-penitents who rush to take up the pen as soon as they lay ...”

“... to her to have wanted more for themselves than they did for Monroe. She may be right about Arthur Miller and the Actors’ Studio guru Lee Strasberg. The former, in his memoir Timebends, describes a girl who was beyond reach, and who seemed impossible to help. Yet his After the Fall shows him at his most self-justifying: Maggie (the Monroe character) is ...”

“... book seem like padding. Musicals that don’t manage this, like most of those by Jerome Kern or Andrew Lloyd Webber, end up as song cycles barely held together by text. When they do pull it off – Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man – they can make for extraordinarily powerful theatrical experiences. Knapp does an excellent job of tracing the ...”

“... culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental ...”

“... speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral ...”

“... version of MacDiarmid’s pastures to work at the London Review of Books, the editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in ...”

“... questions about the mysteries of the Devil gets such good historical answers. From Tymms (1949) to Miller (1985) to the touchingly named Herdman (is he trying to keep us safe, inside the yard?) the literary study of doubles roots itself in Christian accounts of the world, describing how, by trick, by election or by sin, characters break open, split apart, see ...”