“... will move in and out constantly. There will be no community at all.’ The opponents of the Grand Project, this unoccupied City of Illusions with its vivid blue frontier, its plywood scarf, are a community bonded in loss. Whisperers approach me from every side: informed, confused or manageably deranged. On the trading floors of London, on manicured golf ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of Bob Dylan (he first wrote about them in the Listener in June ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... feel – as did many writers in the 18th century – that, until the arrival of the fully-formed David, their achievements failed, with only rare exceptions, to match up to the expectations aroused by the prestige with which they were surrounded. The reasons for this failure in a society so extraordinarily rich in artistic talent should be a matter of ...”

“... a minister had laid himself open to possible blackmail. Stephen Ward, who was an osteopath with a grand clientele, and who had led a mildly louche life, was charged with living on immoral earnings and committed suicide the night before the jury handed down its verdict of guilty. Everyone felt uncomfortable about Ward, but no one believed, since he was ...”

“... need to be identified and treated in an aggressive way.’ On 1 July 2009, a Plymouth County grand jury dropped all criminal charges against Dr Kifuji. Carolyn and Michael Riley were respectively convicted of second and first-degree murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, ...”

“... people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians bring more energy and relish to chronicling the shortcomings of titled or famous ...”

“... In September 1992, David Mellor resigned from the government after concern over an extra-marital affair and a free holiday in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting ...”

“... of the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own ...”

“... his uncompleted last novel, Answered Prayers, Capote succeeded in alienating the majority of the grand friends he had made in the Fifties and Sixties. ‘La Côte Basque, 1965’, forty pages of malicious gossip thinly disguised as fiction, prompted one suicide and general outrage. Unbelievable as it may seem, Capote failed to foresee that ‘La Côte ...”

“... Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get the sense ...”