“... charade in Mexico and shot her in the face, killing her. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature, Jean-Paul Sartre quotes Brice Parain – ‘Les mots sont des pistolets chargés’ – which strikes me as risible hyperbole for someone who, though he was a conscript, never fired a pistol. (Sartre served as a wall-eyed meteorologist in the French army.)The most ...”

“... the whole world; it’s this that makes of her a more divided and indeed interesting writer than Paul Binding’s new study, in its pursuit of a resolving wholeness, will allow. For she is the Optimist’s Daughter whose father died tragically in the prime of life, of leukaemia – ‘a disease that even he had never heard ...”

“... Burroughs at Slabsides, his retreat in the Hudson Valley. In the 1960s troupes of hippies visited Scott Nearing, author of Living the Good Life, at Forest Farm in Maine, in search of spiritual enlightenment. (They were gobsmacked by how cleanly he lived and how hard he worked.) F-W’s appeal is less countercultural – barristers and City workers attend his ...”

“... for the brave and decent Mr Justice Collins. Yet Andrew Collins QC was sharply criticised by the Scott Report for not disclosing documents vital to the defence of six men charged with illegally exporting fuses to Iraq. Another judge who simply could not believe that Parliament, in the shape of Peter Lilley, could contemplate starving asylum seekers to death ...”

“... The most remarkable aspect of the Scott Report is its simplicity. The famous length and the differing interpretations to which it has been subjected since its publication suggest a learned and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... direction of Heaton were half full in the morning and nobody spoke. When I arrived at the house of Paul Wakefield I immediately saw a picture of his handsome younger brother on the coffee table. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ Paul said. ‘He was always quite tough, but brave. He was my hero and he always will be.’ ...”

“... have stayed with one period for a longer space, adding long footnotes, in the manner of Walter Scott. Paul Watkins’s book is more like a historical novel, more of a storyteller’s work. In the Blue Light of African Dreams is an offputting title: it sounds like a Modern Jazz suite or a Proms first (and ...”

“... language of Callimachus, after all), was expected to buy a very big book indeed: Liddell and Scott’s monumental lexicon, big enough to afford the linguistic granularity you need to write Greek prose in the style of Demosthenes’ orations, with citations to corroborate every word used. A schoolboy could lift Liddell and ...”

“... on Schumann’s debt to Romantic aesthetics, particularly as epitomised by the novels of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul). Nicholas Marston, writing on Schumann’s heroes Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, quotes the 19-year-old composer telling Wieck: ‘when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were reading a novel ...”

“... elsewhere, the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari ...”

“... arresting initial display of their subject’s narrative potential. The technique goes back to Scott, and William Kennedy’s Quinn’s Book is orthodox enough in providing a sensational set-piece in its opening pages. He hasn’t deserted his habitual location of the town of Albany but has gone back to how it was in 1849, the date of a freak accumulation ...”

“... for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself directly, without a mask? First and Scott record the events and emotions of Schreiner’s life with minute fidelity, but the living, brilliant-eyed woman escapes yet another attempt to pin her down. Her openness remains too disconcerting; her positions, which defy categorisation, seem to these ...”

“... in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied adequate interpretation by ...”

“... its aftermath the Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre and, on the other side of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Waterloo Bridge, the new National Theatre. The next came in 1977, with the foundation of the Coin Street Action Group when, reacting against a decline in public housing and the proliferation of office blocks, the inhabitants of the area to the east of ...”