“... and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), and two novels, The Vagrants (2009), which seems to me one of the first masterpieces of our stumbling century, and Kinder than Solitude (2014), and now a book of ...”

“... and end up asking: ‘really, must I think about all of this/a second time in this short life? … must I grieve it all again?’ Her jump cuts and exclamations say how absurd, how impossible, an ordinary adult life can seem; such a life must be lived within incompatible timescales, at once attending to the present moment, and planning for the ...”

“... to forced labour and internal exile: ‘an era of forbidden books’, as she puts it in a short afterword to Haywire, ‘books that were victims of the cultural revolution, mostly translated Russian classics: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and sometimes an American like Walt Whitman’. Constantine again: ‘Her poetry has little connection to poetic ...”

“... In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century stressed the disastrous ...”

“... of supplication – cue long flattering speech outdoing Demades? – are, in Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... 850 pubs, went for £239 million. A template had been established. In 1999 they teamed up with Philip Green to buy the retail firm Sears, which owned a number of high-street clothing chains and a mail-order business. These were all sold within six months, making the brothers and Green some £250 million, twice the amount they had put into the deal. Another ...”

“... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... Monday 23 November 1953: Tonight I watched on television the departure of the Queen and Prince Philip from London Airport. It was immensely moving. The Queen looked so young and vulnerable and valiant, and Prince Philip so handsome and cheerful. A truly romantic couple, star quality in excelsis. True glamour without any ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to a ...”

“... months, with the diary unreadable (and illegible). Blame the anaesthetic.4 July. A letter from the Philip Larkin Society, reminding me that I’m an honorary vice-president, which I was unaware of. I’ve never been an enthusiastic member, partly because Larkin wasn’t particularly keen on my stuff or keen on my being keen on his (which I am); Amis (K.) very ...”

“... and narcotic: ‘The yellow winter days arrived, filled with boredom. A threadbare tablecloth, too short and pocked with holes, covered the rust-coloured earth … The days hardened from cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. They were cut open with dull knives, without appetite, with a lazy somnolence.’ The way Schulz’s narrator sums up the ...”

“... makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items do. In short, Larkin at Sixty gets a lot of different kinds of readableness into not much more than a hundred pages. But Alan Bennett’s question, which might be paraphrased as ‘What is Larkin at Sixty for?’, has a point: the book has problems a biscuit barrel ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”