“... been to give to all who read and enjoy her novels another book by Barbara Pym.’ There are, as Charles Lamb pointed out, books which are not books, biblia abiblia. Certainly A Very Private Eye is a long way from being a substitute for a Barbara Pym novel. Even its second or post-1950 half, where we come at last nearer to hearing something recognisable as ...”

“... the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on ...”

“... Loyola’s pastoral care for Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had the misfortune to be married to one of the loutish grandsons of Pope Paul III. Loyola’s concern for Margaret in her misery saved her marriage, and indeed the surviving son after the marriage reconciliation was destined to be the ...”

“... of happy minorities into a more perfect whole.’ That The Golden Age takes several swipes at Frank Capra should come as no surprise. In the volumes written before Vidal had conceived the sequence as a whole, the demands of history and imagination are for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the narrator, ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”

“... range of talents: Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward ...”

“... fiction made? I could no more summarise what’s remarkable about The Wind in the Willows or Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s Cosmic than I could sing all the parts in a hundred-instrument symphony, but there are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I ...”

“... in January 1948 garnered little attention, and nothing sold from a de Kooning exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in April. ‘Isolation,’ Greenberg wrote that year, was ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, and soon the Existentialist talk of alienation was matched by the political reality, as the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her favourite, who lived in London, and the sailor Frank, who reported to her from various war fronts … The sisters made good aunts and friends to the next generation.’ Austen cared for some of her nieces and nephews after their mothers died, and seems to have been remembered fondly by all of them. When one ...”

“... a ministry made up of the Marquis of Rockingham and his adherents – Edmund told his friend Charles O’Hara that ‘Will and I are down on their lists and I hope and believe will be attended to.’ They were. William was appointed under-secretary to Walpole’s friend Henry Seymour Conway, who became one of the King’s two Secretaries of State, and ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to ...”

“... so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his wrongs accumulate, totally lacking the sentiment of mercy, but always true to his culture and its eloquent ...”

“... most accomplished work. And then, in 1991, there was American Psycho. I’m having drinks with Charles Murphy at Rusty’s to fortify myself before making an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party. I’m wearing a four-button double-breasted wool and silk suit, a cotton shirt with button-down collar by Valentino Couture, a patterned silk tie by Armani ...”

“... Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean ...”