“... manageable while shutting out the pain. After a visit to Dublin, he reported to his close friend John Hayward that ‘you would hardly recognise my usually reticent self there: all the Curzon-like aloofness which has been so useful in other contexts, is dropped and a mask of playful blarney is assumed.’* There is self-satire as well as self-knowledge ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans. When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the ...”

“... often to London. Perhaps, in the new AB-as-PM era, the move will be made in the other direction.John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born on 25 February 1917, and the chronicles of his childhood ring with the rough, crepuscular music of Manchester place names: Ancoats, Collyhurst, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Miles Platting, Monsall. Roll them around your mouth, savour ...”

“... fined NZ$400 and his name was printed in the local newspaper that covered the case. He was the bad guy. Ina will vote in the general election ‘no matter what they think about my job’, but without much conviction: ‘Talking about election it just drives me mad. Everybody says I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, but when it comes to actually ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... expulsion if she indulged in any ‘hateful acting out’. Her therapist, Ralph Klein (Pollock’s guy), told her it would be best if she didn’t see the child again until the girl was three.All of this was supposedly for the good of the children, and there was a certain amount of quasi-reputable psychiatric opinion at the time that lent support for the idea ...”

“... awestruck by the philosopher Owen Barfield, and had a quite saintly manner of carefulness with John Berryman, but, these things apart, the volume is quite fogged over with Bellow’s notion that replying to letters was nothing if not a complete and utter waste of time. To Ralph Ellison: ‘I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that ...”

“... around 40 BCE, following a particularly bad stretch of civil war. Virgil calls on his readers (in Guy Lee’s translation) to witness the cataclysmic events that will mark the change from an age of iron to one of gold:Now the last age of Cumae’s prophecy has come;The great succession of centuries is born afresh.…A new begetting now descends from ...”

“... of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It would be good to think that ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... She never remarried after the split with Sinatra. There were, however, countless lovers, from the guy who did the props to (perhaps) Fidel Castro. Though she had some disappointments with sex, in the main her erotic life seems to have been a dizzying round of pleasure. There’s no term for the female equivalent of ‘womanising’, but if there were, Gardner ...”

“... they want to steal they try to break into the main house, not the servants’ quarters. But this guy broke in to rape you. The odds against this are millions to one and the odds against it happening just after you’ve been raped up in Pietersburg are billions to one. So what on earth is going on? I don’t know, she said, I only saw the torch in my face. I ...”

“... Maybe it’s just me​, but the publication of John Updike’s selected letters, masterfully assembled and presented by James Schiff, doesn’t appear to have been the parade event that might have been expected. The reviews have been largely laudatory, marbled with tribute to Updike’s impeccable filigree, effortless versatility, unfaltering application and sleek plumage, but I don’t get the sense that the accolades have resonated beyond the baby boomer contingent of Updikeans who matured with the Rabbit Angstrom novels and counted on the continuing nourishment of his presence in the New Yorker ...”

“... nasty-tasting substance that gets put in household chemicals to stop children from drinking them. John Fletcher MacFarlan was an Edinburgh apothecary who started making laudanum in the early 19th century. T&H Smith moved its flourishing morphine works from the Canongate to Gorgie a century later, and went on to supply both painkillers and sterile dressings to ...”