“... one of the gens du monde, ‘a high-flyer, a metropolitan man’, literary-lioning it in London. Young admirers come up to him in pubs and say: ‘Mr Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action ...”

“... way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate.’ Michael Ignatieff was born in Canada in the 1940s. ‘My friends,’ he remarks a little sheepishly at the start of his book, ‘had suburban pasts or pasts they would rather not talk about. I had a past of Tsarist adventurers, survivors of revolutions, heroic ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... Oxford college is likely to leave its mark on any man – and on any college. There was, for a new young fellow like myself, no shortage of AJP stories, by no means all apocryphal. How, at one college meeting, Alan had proposed that the chapel be turned into a swimming-pool. How Alan had loathed the loathsome Dylan Thomas. How Alan had crossed swords with ...”

“... know transfigured me In one brief moment for eternity. From one brief meeting with someone so young, Dante was translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. It’s my opinion my friend Michael Hofmann is a wizard. Every page of German, Hofmann eats a gizzard, Translates the untranslatable ...”

“... had come to address his college’s literary society. When Amis eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise. ‘Can you give us your “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” face?’ she asked. (Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, is keen on making faces, and is stumped at the end of the book because he is more or less happy, and ...”

“... way, she was in touch with many hundreds of people. What Remains has her being visited by a young woman writer, getting poems from a young man, discussing the future (What Remains) after a reading: unofficial channels – she was denied access (she says) to East German radio and television. She seems always to have ...”

“... and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?’ And when Woolf’s imaginary young writer Mary Carmichael learns the ‘first great lesson’, it is this: ‘she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman’ – the fatality, it turns out, is a matter of too much consciousness rather than of too much gender ...”

“... author: ‘does he consider that such passages...would be apt to raise a blush on the cheek of a young English female?’) Ideologically, Podsnap is a prude, a blinkered patriot and a philistine, and temperamentally he is a bully. The malicious remarks about Forster which have come down divide into those which see the ‘toady’, the upstart ‘Butcher’s ...”

“... rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The young Babbage was a good mathematician by international standards, at a time (the 1810s) when English maths was generally backward. He conceived his first calculating-machine in 1821, when he was 30. Thereafter he did no interesting work in mathematics, not even ...”

“... usual suspects) peasants attending a market fair unleashed their rage on a hapless young nobleman named Alain de Monéys, a short, balding bachelor with ‘a local reputation for politeness and generosity’ who had made the mistake of arriving at the fairground in the wake of his despised cousin, Camille de Maillard. Accused by the crowd of ...”

“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... In the village of Les Estables, near the mountain of Gerbier de Jonc, where the Loire rises, a young geometer participating in the first attempt to map the whole of France is hacked to pieces by the locals. We are in the early 1740s: an increasingly powerful monarchy is seeking to control the ‘jumble of old fiefdoms’, but the rural population see ...”

“... Wasp cultural inheritance and its anglophile geopolitical allegiances: the replica Globe that a young Sam Wanamaker saw at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934 was funded by the British government, and when Wanamaker came to London in 1949 and found no such structure marking the former site of the real Globe he was surprised and disappointed. ‘By this ...”

“... a nail gets knocked in so thoroughly that no one need touch it again, and this is the case with Michael Mill-gate’s biography, which is surely, if the word means anything, definitive. Millgate has been in a strong position to make it so. He has already written a detailed study of the novels, he is evidently a close student of the poetry, and with Purdy is ...”