“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”

“... with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the Donald?) The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails! The Ethical Wreck! Our Straight-Talking-Thick-Ankled Lady of the Half-Explained! (Will Huma be there?) OMGoddess! It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire ...”

“... Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted ...”

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... of nucleoside therapy nor the Vatican’s Bambino Gesù paediatric hospital, nor for that matter Donald Trump, who had begun tweeting offers of help, could alleviate Charlie Gard’s suffering, Great Ormond Street’s medical staff had run a gauntlet of abuse, demonstrations and threats cranked up by religious fundamentalists, but amplified and disseminated ...”

“... stick – and the protesters were singing ‘Oh Canada’ every chance they got.Didn’t they read the news? Apparently not. Many just wanted positive vibes, finding the MSM a real downer. ‘How can they prove all those people died of Covid? I don’t know a single person who’s died.’ Others had curated their internet feeds to show them only what ...”

“... the problem of employment policy, the Treatise has proved no less relevant than the Theory: ‘To read off “Keynesian” policy prescriptions from a single book can give, and has given, rise to systematic errors in applying his ideas.’ Skidelsky also sees more continuity than Clarke between Keynes’s thinking before and after the Slump. Keynes once said ...”

“... it ‘laissez-faire’, which is also a term of abuse for this odd sort of Tory. She’d say you read the Guardian: she’d say you came from Hampstead. That is the level of argument in her book. It is exceedingly entertaining, for she is an unwitting mistress of the double entendre; and it is endearing too, for there is a curious innocence about a woman who ...”

“... permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel supports my exaggeration. The narrator keeps making hyper-critical remarks about ‘we Africans’ with an exclamation-mark. ‘How generous we Africans can be, even with our very strong diseases! Yes, we like to give them ...”

“... the daughter of John Ewing who worked with my father, I was not recruited to be a Quiz Kid (I read Salinger’s stories with some interest). Perhaps it would have taken nepotism a step too far – my Aunt Jean ran Broadcasts to Schools. It was a small world in which connections were easy. Jean married, quite late, Des Buckley, the brother of Pat ...”

“... and came to the conclusion that ‘the best mind in England’ belonged to Herbert Read. Cutting short his England trip, he and his wife headed off for Paris (Tate had married the fierce and ultra-Southern novelist, Caroline Gordon, a few years before: he would later marry her again, after a divorce, and then divorce her yet again). In ...”

“... allowed his once provincial eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.They are translations. Here is a material example of the ‘alienation’ that possesses multiple meanings from Brecht onwards so that ...”

“... most of their evenings at the Gargoyle Club, dancing to ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’ while Donald Maclean got drunk. They had, she says, some ‘idyllic years’ together, though the man Cyril Connolly called ‘the London Freddyair’ had his glum moments, waking his partner as he sang in his sleep ‘I’m always on the outside, on the outside ...”

“... bibliography there are few writers so admired and respected, few bodies of work so attentively read. To judge the value of Seymour-Smith’s approach to the life, we need to look at the way it illuminates the work. And in every genre, it seems to me, he fails to give critical back-up to his partisan zeal. He repeatedly asserts the pre-eminence of Hardy’s ...”

“... Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) – and the writers she likes, notably the late Donald Barthelme. Above all she remembers. ‘I remember the day that the East Bronx began to become the South Bronx.’ ‘My love of country, any country, is always being interrupted in its patriotic advance by terrible remembrance.’ One of the finest pieces ...”