“... knowing, is senseless, even delusional.’This ‘epistemic humility’, as the historian Daniel Frank calls it, is also on show in The Guide to the Perplexed’s discussion of divine attributes. At first this section may seem bold in its embrace of the deliverances of philosophy; Maimonides explicitly rejects the apparent meaning of many scriptural passages ...”

“... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...”

“... raised a question that wouldn’t go away for Auden: the importance, or the impotence, of being frank. Discussing Peer Gynt in The Dyer’s Hand, he wrote that ‘both the dreamer and the madman are in earnest; neither is capable of play-acting.’ The dreamer is ‘like the movie-goer who writes abusive letters to the actor he has seen playing a ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right about the fragility of ...”

“... but of the anti-racist consensus too. What got her into trouble was ‘Getting In and Out’, a frank investigation, included in this collection, into the proprietorship of black pain. Like almost all of Smith’s essays, the piece is interested in several things at once: it is partly a straightforward and mostly laudatory review of Jordan Peele’s ...”

“... of her information is fully accurate or complete. It is, for example, careless to place the artist Frank Stella in a travelling delegation of grown men when he would have been about ten years old, and to quote from books without supplying page numbers or publication history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John ...”

“... with the help of Meyer Lansky, the mobster whose associates controlled the New York waterfront; Frank Sinatra, who had Zionist sympathies as well as Mafia connections, acted as bagman. As leader of the opposition, Churchill was less impressive than Attlee, chiding the government either for following his own example or for not doing what he himself could ...”

“... George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer to Ranald MacDougall’s Hollywood travesty of Kerouac’s San Francisco novella The ...”

“... and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another strand in the traditional tale of architectural revaluation ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... main norm Page upholds within the play, though, is the surely unobjectionable one that his friend Frank Ford should not indulge a paranoid, tyrannous and unfounded jealousy over his wife, Alice. (He may be prosaic in and of himself, but if only Othello or Leontes had spent more time with decent fellows like George!) Tudeau-Clayton is surprisingly ...”

“... and inbred sophistications of Irish literature. One of the most telling essays is written by Michael Hartnett, who, some years ago, switched from writing poetry in English to writing in Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick ...”

“... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a ...”

“... wages was accompanied by the emergence of a new, more left-wing trade-union leadership of which Frank Cousins was the champion. 1961 brought the Selwyn Lloyd ‘pay pause’ (and in its wake the return to planning, or ‘Macmillan Socialism’), and the ‘trade-union problem’ in its modern form can usefully be dated from then. Sir Denis puts his finger ...”