“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of contemplating a man whom Gottlieb admires to the point of worship – Great Expectations is more intriguing than many weightier accounts, perhaps because it allows us to observe, as we might not in a long and dense biography, certain patterns of behaviour, certain obsessions, that we soon realise are absolutely central not only to the plots of ...”

“... Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall ...”

“... the story to Agence-France Presse. General Samih Batikhi, head of the GID, insisted that nothing more than a fight between locals and tourists had taken place; another official suggested that Mishal’s driver had sparked the row by making unwelcome advances to the Canadians. The absence of a weapon wasn’t the only reason the Jordanians were sceptical. Why ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into ...”

“... his poem for its 1729 ‘Variorum’ edition those profuse helpful footnotes which make the text more confusing than before. Pope glosses, for instance, the first occurrence of the name of the poem’s first hero, called in it ‘Tibbald’ though we would now write the name of the Shakespearian scholar in question ‘Theobald’; and the poet’s note ...”

“... in Cambridge, dictated his will. He was to be buried alongside a former master of the college, Thomas Legge, who had died twenty years earlier. Gostlin had commissioned a memorial to his friend which you can see on the south wall of the college chapel. Legge kneels in prayer. Beneath him hands clutch at a blazing heart. ‘Love joined them while they ...”