“... stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but for mine. Her husband, Peter, was well liked by the hardnut, Rangers Club toughs and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us both – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more pronounced ...”

“... readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked ...”

“... which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the difference between leaking and briefing,’ he told a colleague. ‘Leaking is what you ...”

“... vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he ...”

“... He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will sometimes ...”

“... the adult narrator’s ability to interpret the nature of that knowing to the reader. Henry James offers a master-class in point-of-view in his preface to the novel: I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely quickened. So ...”

“... was no more representative ‘Saturday Reviler’ than Leslie Stephen’s older brother, James Fitzjames Stephen. Born in 1829, son of the distinguished public official Sir James Stephen (whose grip on policy was so tight that while heading the Colonial Office he was known as ‘Mr Over-Secretary ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies, she thinks that rhyming English would have been pointless, and Peter Dale’s rather desperate versions (Penguin, 1978) surely prove the point. To the povre Villon, importuned, resurrected, sanctified in heretical pantheons, Sargent-Bauer is a dependable ally. No dutiful translation like hers can hope to ride with the ...”

“... Heaven and Hell’ excludes Leicester from heaven principally on the grounds of lust. After St Peter has interrogated him at length about his involvement in various murders, extortions and usurpations, he is almost persuaded by a show of repentance to admit him even so. St Peter threw open the gate and his Earlship most ...”

“... as he is to enjoy; he did not want scholars to puzzle for a lifetime over his meaning and thought James Joyce, who did, ‘dotty’. So there are no revelations as to what he is saying, just an examination of how he says it. Nor did Waugh quite start at random and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when ...”

“... no surprise that the co-editors of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham, are an academic lawyer and a political scientist. Nevertheless they steer away from stale orthodoxies and insular complacency, interrogating instead Whig assumptions about English exceptionalism. Tamar Herzog questions the ...”

“... These two books are a reminder that architects do usually test their ideas on themselves first. Peter Moro, who worked for Lubetkin’s practice and designed the Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal. Fair-minded, broad-minded and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections ...”