“... so many José Arcadios, even with some Remedios and Amarantas thrown in on the distaff side. Harold Bloom is right to complain of ‘a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is crammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb’.I would add to this an embarrassment the literary commentator is loath to confess, namely ...”

“... Harold Stanley Ede​ , who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century art, as well as hosting exhibitions and concerts, is the place where generations of undergraduates, including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others ...”

“... a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush,’ because the guru Max Bygraves helped me see that love doesn’t mind if you’re different. I liked ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ because there was no resisting the idea of mice in clogs. I liked Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney . . . I liked ...”

“... would be acceptable to the public. But politicians weren’t blameless. ‘All prime ministers love intelligence,’ the diplomat Nicholas Henderson claimed: it allows them to believe that they have a ‘direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have’. At the beginning it all looked innocent enough. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code ...”

“... on his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the spectres of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and blogs; he ...”

“... and treason, asserted Abse, is ‘the child’s lack of reconciliation between his hatred and his love of his father’. At this point, if not before, the non sequitur becomes the methodology of the witch-hunt. To take the most salient counter-example, there was nothing ‘queer’ (Tom’s preferred term, by the way) about Kim Philby, who was the most ...”

“... relative to Spain in barbarous mid-winter. Sophia, chaperoned by a maid, must surely have been in love with him, or she would have withdrawn from that appalling journey. He affected to be deeply upset by her death years later. In Sweden, Sicily and Russia he travelled intermittently with the Misses Holland, daughters of a successful physician, but never ...”

“... just as wary of those today who look for the ultimate explanation of morality – not to mention love, sex, religion and art – in brain scans and evolutionary just-so stories. ‘It is increasingly evident that moral standards, practices and policies reside in our neurobiology,’ the ‘neurophilosopher’ Patricia Churchland claims. ‘Our moral nature ...”

“... disappearing under the water. All they ever found of her were her flippers.‘Scenes of marital love seem to set up shark attacks particularly well,’ Leanne Shapton writes in Swimming Studies, her memoir from 2012. Earlier in the book, she relates a similar scene from her own life. On New Year’s Eve 2009, newly engaged, she and her partner, James, were ...”

“... of Longmuir’s minibar. Many elements of Maudling’s story are present in this vignette: his love of the good life for himself and, especially, for Beryl; his likeability and accessibility to journalists who, as a result, long protected him; his ever-worsening alcoholism; and his insistence on a style of living which he could not afford and which drove ...”

“... well-known study of 1959, and also in Vincent Brome’s Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love, published last year. But students of biography will particularly welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original ...”

“... impresario, Mr Sleary, the brandified circus-master, for all his slurred diction: ‘There ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-Interetht, after all.’ There is a photograph of Dr Leavis in this book, to illustrate a paragraph in Time which Hall ‘particularly wanted to record’. Time had alleged that Hall ‘studied English under F.R. Leavis: Even ...”

“... but for the last 25 years of her life she also shared an apartment on the Upper East Side with Harold Korn, a professor at Columbia University Law School; they married shortly before Clampitt’s death in 1994, of ovarian cancer. In the summers, they spent weeks in Maine, the location of many of Clampitt’s poems of fog, sea and sundews. Salter, in ...”

“... on the spectrum of animal sex; and even more troubling perhaps to think that the whole idea of love, the rock on which contemporary secular metaphysics is founded, is a sexual gimmick peculiar to our species – one at which the other animals can snigger and wonder just as we wonder at their prickly penises and hermaphrodite penetration duels. Wary of the ...”

“... a bit. His arrogance sometimes turned belligerent. Beyond that, it’s just gossip. Did Greenberg love Helen Frankenthaler because he admired her painting, or vice versa? Does it matter? Only in reminding us that life inflects both art and criticism more than Greenberg would have liked. He announced several times that biography, while interesting, didn’t ...”