“... the first time, with any expectation of the riches of Woolf’s. For Forster the diary was of far more spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well not be a writer’s diary at all. As he acknowledged, ‘unfortunately I only open this book when my heart aches’; and even then there can be passages as stoically ...”

“... Setting the record straight is only a modest part of Carpenter’s project in this biography. His more ambitious aim is to relate Britten’s emotional and sexual life to his music. This is a tall order; it’s clear that Carpenter doesn’t really appreciate how tall. He identifies and catalogues the links between Britten’s music and other aspects of his ...”

“... level, are long lines of seats for the many lawyers. Eleven men sit in a glass box, with three more in front. These are the accused. Outside the room, a line of TV reporters wait to capture the reactions of those leaving the court.The discussions that take place inside are the result of five years of investigation. The work has been careful and ...”

“... of 2018, Apple became the first public company in the world to have a market capitalisation of more than a trillion dollars. Today, each of the ten biggest companies in the world is worth more than $1 trillion. Only one of them, the Saudi oil monopoly, Aramco, has nothing to do with the future value of AI. The top ...”

“... under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the ‘social anarchy’ of capitalist free markets by delivering ‘social regulation of production upon a definite plan’. Forty years later Lenin promised to rejuvenate Russia with a ...”

“... leave a message, and out loud you curse her, calling her an arrogant bitch, but the beep is much more sudden than you expect and you realise you’ve been recorded. Such moments are small catastrophes, and the only way we have of dealing with them is to behave as though they had never happened or persuade ourselves that their impact is less dreadful than it ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”

“... things seemed normal: D.F. Heaney’s, the newsagent; Kernan’s Fruit – Veg. A few small shops, more like parlours than shops, are devoted to ladies’ fashions, with names like Scruples and Elegance. You always see these places in Ireland and Scotland – hard against the chip shop – with tall mannequins and their big eyelashes. A flow of youngsters came ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”