“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of ...”

“... At that time, in other words, and alongside neo-con celebrities such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, Fukuyama was beating the drum for a ‘shift in focus from al-Qaida to Iraq’. He now expresses qualms about the killing of ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis who had done nothing to harm America or its inhabitants: ‘These casualties ...”

“... to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian ...”

“... worried yet – Mitchell often took his sweet time writing a piece, and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, was never one to press a question, or even ask one in a voice above a whisper. Mitchell thought of his dream as marking the exact day ‘I began living in the past,’ but that, it could be argued, was a natural step for a man writing a book about ...”

“... receive witty Addisonian or Popean epistles until his daily postbag looked more like that of ‘a broad plodding son of Day-Book and Ledger’ than a ploughboy’s. Later it was the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, which he founded and dominated, a space in which young men from the town and the farms gathered to drink, laugh, boast about their girls and engage in ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”

“... amazing, easy efficiency of the intellectual machine which ground away behind his wide temples and broad, smiling face’.Ramsey’s social circle overlapped with the Bloomsbury Group and he shared their ideology of intimate friendship and free love. This didn’t always work out well. At one point, he became obsessed with a friend’s wife, asking her ...”

“... Tom-All-Alone’s. The instalment begins, however, with the relentlessly self-promoting law-clerk William Guppy, who several hundred pages before had identified Esther Summerson’s true parentage, and immediately sought her hand in marriage (Esther remembers him as heavily scented on that occasion with ‘bear’s-grease, and other perfumery’). He is about ...”

“... them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’ Blake’s famous remark in the margins of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art has always mystified me. How could Blake, the fierce ‘prophet against empire’, name his own beloved vocation of ‘Art and ...”

“... deconstruction had long been the extracurricular resort of clever or bored philosophers; as in William James’s Hegelian revelation under the effects of laughing gas: ‘What’s mistake but a kind of take?’ De Man had broached the idea in his first book. Blindness and Insight (1971). In Allegories of Reading (1979), the only other book he lived to ...”

“... set, and needs these books as dressing. Apparently, a group gathered at the Statesman to honour William Empson. For surviving. A sane voice in a fox-crazy world. There were lengthy speeches, drinks, more speeches, more drinks, and a presentation. But when the moment came around, and they looked for the great man, the bearded sage, it had to be admitted ...”

“... the original. The Garnett version, however, is so utterly unobtrusive as to deserve the plaudit of William Weaver, our senior living translator, who prefaces his translation of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller with this note: ‘In Chapter Eight the passage from Crime and Punishment is quoted in the beloved translation of Constance ...”

“... as he set out for Westminster: ‘Never expose yourself, James, to be tried for a rape, for your broad shoulders will cause a jury to think it probable you made the attempt, and your face will make it manifest that it must have been against the will.’ But it’s rare for Johnson to give such a vivid glimpse of two people for whom he has no other ...”