“... Only one of these five memoirs can be fairly called secular – quite unconcerned with the consolations of religion, untroubled by the complications. This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire ...”

“... have thrown away the wurrld ye knew ... And if ye try tae find yer way back it’ll be too late, because yew’ll ’ave changed as well – an’ there’ll be nowhere tae go back tae.’ The prediction was true and, because he knew it, Glasser accepted the scholarship, for what was there in that ...”

“... One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer. He was popping quantities of pills; he hardly ever slept; he seemed to provoke showdowns with any authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself ...”

“... via its Press and Public Relations Unit, offers us a preview of the library of the future – BL 2000. The presentational style is that of the glossy super-confident company report and the abbreviated ‘aims and goals’ phraseology beloved of macho commerce. Successful business operatives (‘winners’) waste no time on words. The imperative forms of ...”

“... the obscure Neapolitan philosopher who had been ‘discovered’ a hundred years after his death by Michelet and the Romantics, and was subsequently made much of by Italian philosophers understandably anxious to demonstrate the continuing originality of their national culture in the long interval since the ...”

“... new historians most clearly from the traditionalists is that they are critical of the claims made by Israeli governments, claims which were turned into national myths and as such continue to influence popular attitudes to the Arabs even now. So far the new historiography has focused mainly on the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and on the ‘missed opportunity’ for ...”

“... was leaving a committee meeting when an unknown comrade came up and pressed a letter ‘to be read later’ into his hand. Hannington soon removed the envelope from his pocket, opened it idly, and was astonished to find himself summoned to a secret meeting where all kinds of mayhem and sedition were on the agenda. The note was couched in terms that ...”

“... yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four months later. For at least three and possibly even six years before leaving Bristol, Chatterton was constructing the ...”

“... Among major 20th-century critics who wrote in English, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is still by far the most readable – readable anywhere and at any time. Only professionals are likely to find his style, and even his methods, entirely too informal and amateurish – absence of footnotes, personal tone etc. But I can testify to being able to read him with pleasure and for no particular reason at home, on a bus, in an office, a hospital waiting-room, a hotel ...”

“... greatly from being ‘entangled’ in a ‘quagmire’ in Indo-China, and should henceforth be extremely prudent about overseas military commitments. Jimmy Carter put it very gruffly, when he said that both America and Vietnam had suffered equally. Henry Kissinger, in his memoir Years of Upheaval, phrased it even more prettily: ‘Hanoi and Washington ...”

“... series of addresses in the US. They continue across four troubled years in Latin America, followed by the celebrated stint in Tangier, which begins in 1954 and ends almost four years later with the manuscript of Naked Lunch in presentable form. The remaining letters are from Paris. Altogether there are more than 180, most of them fascinating. The majority ...”

“... Abwicklung der DDR, show British diplomacy in a particularly sorry light.) To this catalogue may be added the Government’s obstructive posturing on European integration, its confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in ...”

“... the Museum’s imposing portico, at the start of a recent survey of national collections conducted by the Museums Journal. The BM is not an exhibition of the nation nor does it incorporate one coherently developed collection. Until well into the 19th century it housed the legacy of the Royal Library, the Classical legacy of ...”

“... According to the careful estimate given here, there was some embroidery in these accounts. By the end of his premiership Lloyd George hardly needed to embroider. The job was being done for him. To Baldwin he was a ‘dynamic force’. Keynes called him ‘this half human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic ...”

“... calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story. ‘Truth,’ one of the characters remarks, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things.’ Bedford, always inclined to look down her nose at ...”