“... binge. ‘Some people say that life is the thing but I prefer reading,’ as Logan Pearsall Smith put it; and the rich succulence of Yerofeev’s Russian, not really translatable although Stephen Mulrine makes a good and brave attempt at it, begins after a few pages to give us the gloriously static feel of Russian social drinking, with the almost ...”

“... Prime Minister. For anyone unfortunate enough to have read all the biographies of Wilson (Leslie Smith, Dudley Smith, Gerard Noel, Ernest Kay and others even worse) there is really nothing new here. It is the same old story of the young Boy Scout, Nonconformist and Liberal. He says he joined the Oxford University Labour ...”

“... of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à ...”

“... them: everything radiates out from the city. ‘I came in the 1980s as a student,’ Dave Smith, the head of Stepping Stone, which is based in Rochdale, told me. ‘Manchester city centre was a desert. You really wouldn’t go for a night out there unless you were going to the Hacienda or one of them clubs. You’d stay in your locality. Now they ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... the early part, in the narrator’s consciousness, can be delicious: as good as Virginia Woolf, or John Betjeman, who would have adored subtle pentameters like ‘The irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own ...”

“... by toe-curling choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’), hand-holding, embracing, chants (‘Hi, John!’). This is evidently necessary to create a structure for the incoming drunk in free fall or those whose sobriety is fragile. The structure is always there and always the same; a reassuringly solid thing in a dangerously liquid world. What is rarely boring ...”

“... appreciative exclamation at the success of the character of the Branghtons’ tenant Mr Smith, who speaks of himself as ‘a man who wishes to have things a little genteel’. Johnson was delighted by this ‘Holbourn Beau’: ‘such a fine varnish of low politeness! – such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’ Mrs Thrale claimed to recognise just ...”

“... to relax. The closest thing we’ve had over here to Cheney’s peppering his buddy with lead is John Prescott’s lamping that farm worker who threw an egg at him in 2001. I know I’m not alone in thinking that Cheney’s cavalier way with a shotgun and disregard for the safety of his shooting companions pales in comparison to, say, his role in the war in ...”

“... being an outsider and reinforced his grievances against his father. (He adored his mother.)Herbert Smith, his English teacher, became his mentor. During the summer of 1922, just before Robert started at Harvard, Smith accompanied the boy (at his parents’ request) on a visit to his quintessentially Wasp chum from the ...”

“... one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”

“... on reality – must be like Wordsworth’s experience of two consciousnesses, or like the turn, as John Sturrock describes it in The Language of Autobiography, that occurs when the autobiographer sees their written self suddenly cohere. The place condenses into the image; nothing more can be seen now. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s ‘Montague Street in ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in neighbouring Mozambique. According to Ranger, the disparaging depictions of Zanu and its military wing Zanla were based on unavoidable ...”