“... Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient yelling: ‘How often do you sleep with prostitutes?’) But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather reluctantly, photographed with Neal Cassady, and who had herself been responsible for some of the ...”

“... I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do. Few writers are reviewers tout court, most having other jobs as novelists, historians, biographers or whatever, and writing reviews simply because they need or want the money. It’s harmless enough but it makes literature a nastier world. 8 January. Reading ...”

“... one defect. As Mr Wilson pointed out next morning, he hadn’t travelled to London by train. He’d made the journey by car. Harold, on the other hand, was careful not to deny the overall sense of the Crossbencher paragraph: namely, that he did indeed think he could become Leader of the Labour Party. He had been in very little doubt about that matter from the ...”

“... angels going up and down a stairway to heaven, and I can still see their white robes as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The ...”

“... death in 1774 stories of his ‘absurdities’ multiplied: he was ‘little Goldy’, Dr Minor to Johnson’s Dr Major, the Sancho Panza of English literature, ‘an idiot in the ways of the world’, an ‘anomalous character’, envious, blundering, clownish. James Prior’s full, scholarly biography, designed ...”

“... to work out why original sin, even in its secular versions, was an idea we should not be trying to do without. And clearly no modern writing has yet been able to do without a version of it, whether as something to be acknowledged or as something to be defied. The problem of original sin, secularised as the problem of ...”

“... cinema barely five minutes away with multiple screens and a grown-up programming policy. I’d be free to go in the afternoon all alone (an old movie-going treat) or in company of an evening. But I don’t. I notice a film that I think might be good, and then shake my head at the idea of actually going to see it. The risk of disappointment is too ...”

“... been the biggest invasion in human history, dwarfing even the Normandy landings. In this case, D-Day was to be 1 November 1945. An American army of five million men was to be assembled for the invasion of Japan, with smaller but still significant contingents from Britain, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth. Despite an unprecedented advance ...”

“... through the play that made Stoppard famous. The two main characters are homesick. In escalating, hall-of-mirrors, Chinese-dolls Stoppardian fashion, this observation throws light on the drama from which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern springs, and which turns from being the main thing to a subplot, becoming a play within a play. The echo of ‘home’ in the ...”

“... Before my appointment​ with the albatross, I’d planned to draw it differently. We first met through glass: the skeleton was in a cabinet in the museum, displayed on a high shelf. If you looked up and dodged the reflections you could see the curved sweep of its beak and the Z-shaped slashes of its vast folded wings ...”

“... prevent any foreigner from buying a British national paper, and Colonel Qadhafi himself tried to do so in the case of the Observer. Readers have no say in the fate of their favourite paper; and shareholders are often kept in the dark. The affairs of newspaper owners seem not to belong in the public domain: indeed, the rival proprietors go to extraordinary ...”

“... and spewed out what was left and no use to him’; ‘if you said the wrong thing to Ben, you’d get a look from those cold blue eyes’; ‘he had the gift of relating to you in conversation which made you feel as if you were in a warm bath.’ Britten had an extreme need for the devotion of others. His ability to charm people into giving him this ...”

“... cent, and fell in Yorkshire and the Humber by 8 per cent between 2010 and 2014. Lord Young, now David Cameron’s ‘enterprise tsar’, had to resign in late 2010 after suggesting that people ‘have never had it so good’.It was only after substantial Tory losses in the North at the 2014 European elections that George Osborne launched a regional ...”

“... many books, which were not commonly known at the Universities … so that when I came to Oxford, Dr Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.’ But the money ran out, and he was unable to complete his degree. Long before, he had stopped attending lectures because his toes ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a ...”