“... but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley did. Not all societies ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... how rapid and total the change has been, and how emboldened the party ought to be. Boris Johnson won the 2019 election with a majority of 80 and 44 per cent of the popular vote. Just five years later, with one constituency in the Highlands still to declare, Starmer’s Labour has won 412 seats – a majority of 175 – while the Tories clung on to ...”

“... literature: ‘effects-based operations’ were defined by the former US air force general David Deptula during the First Gulf War as a means of applying the minimum conventional force to achieve the greatest strategic effect. In US government planning, ‘proxy warfare’ is the preserve of wily enemies, Iran and Russia in particular. The US National ...”

“... of Orwell because, as I argued in the book, English ‘biography’, since the time of Dr Johnson, has come to imply the portrait of a character. The main business of a biographer has often been thought to be that of ‘getting inside’ his subject, ‘grasping the inwardness’, ‘revealing the true personality’ – in a word, empathy. And this ...”

“... and issued in forms determined by the publishing, cultural and academic orthodoxies of the day. Johnson’s 1955 edition is now routinely taken to embody the ideals and blindnesses of the New Criticism, while an editorial commitment to the variant-strewn manuscripts – a kind of ‘choosing not choosing’ (to borrow the title of an influential book on ...”

“... Besides, I had already spent an excellent evening with this fascist general!’ He even stood up David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state, while missing none of his appointments with Palestinian citizens of Israel. When Meir Ya’ari, the Mapam party leader, asked him about his remarks in Cairo on the right of return, Sartre said: ‘It is impossible to ...”

“... unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic basso profundo fine-tuned for ...”

“... however, inaugurating the fifth party system, whose divisions were further exacerbated by Lyndon Johnson’s social reforms in the 1960s and by the Reaganite counter-revolution which followed in the 1980s. Americans now find themselves in the middle of a further realignment which has put paid not only to the post-New Deal system, but also to an entrenched ...”

“... or the investor in the transatlantic slave trade. The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines … for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... used to construct his fakes. The chest eventually became such a mythic object that even Dr Johnson heaved himself to the top of the church to view it. According to Chatterton’s mother – one of the more reliable of the earlier witnesses – her son’s imagination was fired by the sight of those early manuscripts, in particular an illuminated ...”

“... This extreme unevenness of coverage is not at all unusual: in R.W. Chapman’s edition of Johnson’s letters, for instance, there are more letters from Johnson’s last year than from his first fifty years put together. The exception that proves the rule is Dickens, who became so famous so young that people ...”

“... was inventively foul-mouthed, he hated Middle English, and he was quite good at impersonating David Cecil, or Cess-hole (though not so good as Amis, at whose relentless mimicries Larkin usually guffawed). Larkin also drank a lot – beer, mostly – and merciless derision appeared to be his social forte. He was indeed the sort of chap who knew exactly ...”