“... in the Times Literary Supplement often feature the talents of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one ...”

“... at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern arrogance. Back in 1925 we find MacDiarmid scorning them for it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: And O! to think that there are ...”

“... best books written about Britain in the 1970s. It is Britain in the 1970s, in its every word and page. The quotes from newspaper reports, royal commissions, readers’ letters, political speeches. The sociological citations, starting out with Jock Young and Stanley Cohen, moving on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round ...”

“... of James in its use of minute movement and flickering change of atmosphere, and close also to Alan Hollinghurst’s work in the way it mixes comedy of manners with sheer social tension. There is a marvellous moment when Jack, at the piano, plays some hymns and then begins to sing, ‘I want a Sunday kind of love, a love that lasts past Saturday ...”

“... day, of an entire poem. On this occasion he was reading, with his nose about two inches from the page, a galley of Seamus’s poem in tribute to MacDiarmid, ‘An Invocation’. He asked me if I could see my way clear to getting Professor Heaney on the phone. (Seamus was teaching at Harvard.) I could only hear one side of the conversation, but it went pretty ...”

“... fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule most impressively, reaching the end of the alphabet with the four volumes ...”

“... and he put a ship’s bell in the garden. (The original lighthouse was built by his uncle Alan, 12 miles south-west of Tiree.) Fanny put benches here and there, so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in Bournemouth; he was 84 that year. He ...”

“... high tea: Welsh rarebit, trifle.Stamps. Donald started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a ...”

“... Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some filthy tricks in store; but ...”

“... partly inspired by Stevenson. For how long had that book been his only companion?Wait [near/new] M page cue       M qu [enos] sedge country brid low [people ago dons] biaz       be Queer oranges VIATI false teethrillrer newtos winter autumn dies when       we are him       memo septuesguesim ALSORT Joel boy [eos/is] Galleon ...”

“... Acker having friendships with some peers and contemporaries, Jeanette Winterson, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Geoff Ryman, Kaveney herself; but she was susceptible to ‘Ackerlites’ and could herself be a bit of a climber and a user. ‘Neil remarked … that I was more important to Kathy than I realised,’ Kaveney writes. ‘You were her trophy weird ...”

“... as having ‘very poor recollection of the events’. Yet she found in favour of the firm: her 32-page judgment found that, since Maguire had yielded to pressure to do the same dangerous thing in the past, it couldn’t be dangerous. Maguire described one meeting that took place after the incident and before his sacking where Park told him it was pointless to ...”

“... portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy carries the reader along even in the thick of ...”

“... respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders ...”

“... it sit in their bank earning interest. Take a look at the balance sheet, however, and at the page after page of corporate reports and footnotes which accompany it, and it’s a different story. High levels of deposits mean high levels of liabilities; and high levels of liabilities oblige a bank to have high levels of ...”