“... 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 ...”

“... were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film had acquired two expensive stars: Alan Arkin and Goldie ...”

“... truth. She told King that hers was ‘an excitable family with a passion for detail and a love of home and hearth that helped to make the smallest expedition beyond home an occasion to recall in minute detail’. As a teenager, she wrote diaries addressed to a Mr Ardenue, the grey-bearded ruler of the Land of Ardenue, the first in a series of ...”

“... together with the small frisson of difference. Publishers, film studios and TV executives love sequels, since they seem to guarantee a ready-made audience. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list at the time of writing shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further adventures of Hannibal the Cannibal in Thomas Harris’s continuation of ...”

“... interfered with his ministers, particularly at the Foreign Office, where he soon replaced Harold Macmillan with the more malleable Selwyn Lloyd. He used to ring them up at weekends or in the middle of the night, often on quite trivial matters. The author suggests this reflected a lack of self-confidence in domestic affairs but strongly denies that it ...”

“... inflicting it on an audience. Hugh and Moggie were suggested by – but not modelled on – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1968 Nicolson’s diaries had just been published with his passionate account of the fight against Appeasement in the Thirties and how, come the war, appeasers like Chips Channon conveniently forgot to eat their words ...”