“... third volume of the Letters, speaking about the matter in a typical blend of candour and lack of fuss, but not without all regard for dramatic timing. If Lyttelton did think the Hart-Davis pattern of living startling, he showed the qualities of the 19th-century viewpoint invoked above by concealing the smallest suggestion of surprise. In his acting ...”

“... of English nationalism and national self-awareness is a familiar subject. It is ten years since ‘Diana Week’ in London – a sea of red and white English flags, with hardly a Union Jack to be seen – confirmed that the St George’s Cross had become the flag of the heart for millions of English families, a symbol of allegiance which had spread far beyond ...”

“... suggests – this is one of his provocations – that maybe they couldn’t see why such a fuss was made about beating natives, because they had all been ‘routinely caned at their public schools and even enjoyed it as sexually exciting’.) This is why Britain’s Declining Empire must be seen as telling – or at least getting to the bottom of ...”

“... and Other Poems (2009). Perhaps the best way to appreciate Updike and discover what all the fuss was about is to start with the early stories and novels and carve out your own canon at a stately pace, as his lordship would desire. Even novels regarded as misfires or miscalculations contain phosphorescent passages of which no other writer, save Nabokov ...”

“... of the hysteria of that time, to which I was not immune. I have mixed feelings about Princess Diana, but when nowadays her concern for and embracing of Aids sufferers is disparaged as being of no particular consequence I very much disagree. It was a kind of courage of which I would have been incapable.19 May. I’m reading The Unaccompanied, Simon ...”

“... because they drink when pregnant, or might drink (or commit other sins) when pregnant. This fuss over the foetus, however, which serves further to police and even incarcerate females, accompanies a wholesale carelessness about population health in general, and about industrial causes of unhealth. Virtue seems to require an authoritarian custody of the ...”