“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... owner and mail carrier in Florida’, as the historian Steven Watts records it, before five more cross-country moves in Walt’s lifetime. The son was made to earn money for the family, carrying newspapers, selling on the railroads, even peddling butter to his rich classmates’ families. Walt and his older brother Roy – later the main businessman for ...”

“... became known) is the story of how its protagonists became embroiled in these inventions and, more controversially, enlarged them.‘I am​ content to observe, not interfere and have all my life been afraid above all of being involved,’ Berlin once told a friend. Impatient with this legend of self-effacement, Pasternak’s sister Lydia (who lived in ...”

“... was a bear, a bull, a threat to those who knew him. ‘A born joiner,’ said his second wife, but more of a born leaver, a disjoiner and divorcer. He was a maker of poems but also their unmaker and negator, falling into a habit of revision which became a compulsion: so that the scholarship of his verse bears an element of anguish, which sends its shadow ...”

“... wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a traditional railway pub and a vine-draped cottage out of Thomas Hardy. The cottage and the titular angel path would be illegally obliterated, with posthumous apologies, at the great Olympic moment in 2012. Chobham Farm workers, soon to be picketed by the dockers whose territory they were invading, were paid, by ...”

“... therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The element of apparent ...”

“... many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football. He will be missed more than we can say.Where shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your ...”

“... in Lower Austria, and kept her there for 24 years, abusing her persistently and fathering seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title ‘Im Verlassenen’. It begins: ‘Austria is a small world in which the big world holds its rehearsal. The performance takes ...”

“... ethics (or metaphysics) of penetration. Is this a man who has ‘seen through’ anyone? What’s more difficult: seeing through, or deep inside, the people who surround you, or seeing them in a way that stops at the facts of this or that expression – that doesn’t imagine some secrecy informing them? These are questions, no doubt, that come up with a ...”

“... us choose a Freud, as if to write this life without a case to prove were impossible. If we need more lives of Freud it is because there is safety in numbers, but the evidential burden tends to drain them of ordinary kinds of biographical interest, as if we are not allowed to read the novel of Freud’s life for the story alone. One consequence is that his ...”

“... Dick Cheney, like Bush a Texas oil industry veteran, announced a new American policy of generating more energy, rather than conserving existing supplies, and predicted that the US would need between 1300 and 1900 new power stations in the next twenty years, most of them burning coal – ‘not the cleanest source of energy,’ Cheney conceded, ‘but the most ...”

“... warmer than it was. Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s ...”

“... quite sure what it meant. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of Longford, Thomas Pakenham (Anglo-Irish historian and brother of Antonia Fraser), ‘is dying to meet you. He has been reading all your old novels under the impression that you are J.G. Farrell’s mother. In any case he thinks they are very good.’ She was not related to ...”

“... like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an ...”

“... biggest economy in the world. This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. Growth hasn’t slowed down since the global financial crisis – or, as those cheeky scamps at the CCP tend to call it, the Western financial crisis. While the developed world has been ...”