“... in which the abiding presence across the generations was Woolf. Once again, Cunningham turns Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence into the stuff of fiction. Woolf dictated the text of the characters’ lives in The Hours, just as Whitman does for those in Specimen Days. But now Cunningham has upped the stakes. We do not move, as we did then, from Sussex ...”

“... He complained about his tutors at Oxford. He complained with special vehemence when his uncle Harold, the first Lord Rothermere (Lord Northcliffe had died in 1922, the year King graduated), declined to give him the important job in newspapers that he felt was his due. Instead Rothermere sent him to Scotland to learn the ropes on the Glasgow Record and the ...”

“... Horror’s latex zombies. It poses a problem, as if exempt from Anglo-Saxons’ flippancy and love of diminuendo that, sensibly enough, cut moral grandiosity down to size. Not that the boulevard press has any trouble speaking in both tongues, often at the same time. The child killers of James Bulger are ‘evil’, as of course are paedophiles; maybe ...”

“... were failures, that Labour never managed to become ‘the natural party of government’ as Harold Wilson wished, and that this was reflected in its failure ever to get elected for two full terms. Traumatised by four successive defeats, Blair wanted above all to make Labour electable and then to secure those two full terms. This would demonstrate that ...”

“... took Marlon into her family: that meant her brother, the actor Luther Adler; her second husband, Harold Clurman, a leader of the Group Theatre, and Stella’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ellen, who was three years younger than Marlon. She and Marlon became lifelong friends, and they were lovers over the years (this is tactfully handled by Mann just ...”

“... the mayor’s murder. The story emerged in 1988, in an authorised biography of Maxwell written by Harold Wilson’s former adviser Joe Haines, later a journalist on the Mirror. In a letter to his wife quoted in the book, Maxwell described the episode: he ordered the townspeople to fetch the mayor, then told the mayor to go back into the town to tell the ...”

“... they are very different: Barthes plays the ‘seductive pied piper’, Damisch the ‘tough love’ father. Pedagogically, too, they take opposite approaches. Barthes teaches his students how to pare a project down to ‘a couple of essential issues’, while Damisch shows them ‘how independent fields of knowledge can rub against one another, and how ...”

“... issues for the Washington Post, and enjoys a cosy relationship with US Intelligence, is quoting Harold Weisberg’s opinion of Stone as a prostitute. Lardner’s review was the first ‘pre-emptive strike’ in the media attack on JFK. His review appeared almost six months before the movie was released, and was based on a script of the film ‘obtained by ...”

“... Can they be running at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?’ His family’s love makes it seem impossible that these people intend to kill him. Then as a Frenchman bears down with fixed bayonet, Nikolai flings his pistol at him and runs for the nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy ...”

“... no treatises and left no personally revealing documents. His own views on religion, politics, love, good life, poetry, philosophy, history, creativity, theatre or anything else are hidden from us, much as we might wish it otherwise. Bate gets the familiar disclaimer out of the way in his book’s opening sentences: ‘What did Shakespeare believe? We can ...”

“... Some younger people saw her as a sort of relic – people like the Sitwells and Ronald Firbank and Harold Acton – but all that rather bored her. She was very up to the minute, and would be full of the latest musical comedy or the latest thing that had been written. But she wrote a memoir of Wilde, which I published along with his letters to her in a magazine ...”

“... saw as representing a stage of religious development from which Christianity, with its equation of love with torture, was a regression. Moreover he had argued, in his lost book Asymmetry in Buddha Faces, that by giving each of the Buddha’s profiles a separate expression the sculptors produced a sort of icon of unity in dissimilarity, and of the way in which ...”

“... the poem finds a language vividly metaphorical to the point of drama, in which to speak of both love and art in terms of the power they both yield. From first to last, the Master (both Maestro and tyrant) is the Duke himself: ‘That’s my ... for me.’ But while we read, we cannot usefully distinguish between Browning’s voice and the Duke’s ...”

“... idea that the work of art is in some sense about itself. Even in the fine arts, apparently most in love with the visible world, the great painter will be said to paint himself in every portrait. The exquisite old lady reading in a pool of light holds the stillness of Rembrandt himself as he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court ...”

“... to me was to the point: ‘Your aunts and uncles are extremely affectionate people, and they love you and one must never be impolite. Like it or not, we are part of this family, but please never underestimate the levels of stupidity. When I see how stupid all your mother’s five brothers are I feel there must have been some creative design ...”