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“... Theory of Life – are all elucidated in this fine study. The literary rows about plagiarism, and Norman Fruman’s detective work on these, need never have happened. And the various pieces that passed comment on Fruman (one of them, also written by Christopher Ricks, was given the heading ‘The Moral Imbecility of a Would-Be Wunderkind’) Levere ...”

“... all her fears. And she removed the cause of them. Towards the end of the trial she appeared white and tired, but she did not waver in her composure or in the assertion of her innocence. Whether this was belle indifférence or simply the relief of having taken action at last would need the competence of quite a different court to decide. And yet she is ...”

“... of Secker’s series of regional anthologies. It is elegantly produced with half a dozen black and white illustrations of which the charming (c.1850) print of Ballantyne’s Close, Grass-market, over against Norman MacCaig’s poem, ‘Edinburgh Courtyard in July’, may be taken as typical, both in respect of quality and of ...”

“... of pride to him to this day, and was at the time a healthy source of rivalry between himself, Norman Mailer and James Jones. There is no reason for him not to try and have this both ways, like so much else. But that would mean noticing that he was trying to do so.In a way that is not perhaps quite dissimilar, Vidal returns again and again to his contempt ...”

“... An anointed king of England hadn’t taken one of his own subjects for a wife since before the Norman Conquest, so why did Edward? Certainly, he was ‘wild with desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep ...”

“... ends, sooner or later. The logic of not knowing why we are in Vietnam, to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer, is that we shall scarcely know why we are anywhere, including home. Apocalypse Now Redux contains a whole miniature film within the film, twenty-five or so restored minutes, in which Willard’s group comes across an isolated French plantation, and ...”

“... technology. The Domesday Book was the first and BSE might be thought of as a tardy riposte to that Norman intrusion – the disease, after all, has crossed the Channel in the opposite direction. In any event, it is clear that the story Phillips tells is peculiarly English, to the point that some Scottish scientists, Welsh public health doctors and Northern ...”

“... that our old home had been knocked down. Not only knocked down, but replaced by a hideous piece of white-box modernism, with a poser’s narrow swimming pool and a triple-height atrium overlooking where the garden used to be. The punchline was that this new development was empty and abandoned too. I felt, of all unexpected things, a wave of relief. The only ...”

“... become ardent Nazis). But his career as a journalist began when he wangled a job as assistant to Norman Ebbutt, the Times correspondent in Berlin. Ebbutt and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully ...”

“... East. In an observation which is on a par with his wife Midge Decter’s about Libya and the IRA, Norman Podhoretz complains about the ‘mindless bias’ of the press in favour of terrorists and Yasser Arafat. In fact, as everybody except Mr and Mrs Podhoretz knows, the American press has been biased in favour of Zionism. Discussion of Middle Eastern ...”

“... or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail white calves beneath billowing Bermuda shorts: not, at that era, a part of the expected scene on Nassau Street in Princeton. It was Artur Sergeevich, now removed from New York to live on Linden Lane, in the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques ...”

“... other musical forms.’ He goes on to argue for this with all the acumen and none of the irony of Norman Tebbit arguing for the aesthetic claims of page-three girls (Rubens painted naked women, too). Thus Lanza: ‘Judging from their literature, the Greeks were rarely without some kind of perpetual musical soundtrack’; ‘Gregorian chants most likely ...”

“... tale. Anti-semitism was not uncommon in postwar Britain, whether among the establishment (Montagu Norman, for example, the governor of the Bank of England, was notoriously anti-semitic) or on the street – in 1947 there were anti-semitic riots in several British cities. In 1948, there were race riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when ...”

“... ring, as she said she would.Ionce​ went to a fancy dress party as Beauvoir: I wound a black and white scarf round my head as a turban, but people kept asking who I was supposed to be and I kept having to get my copy of Le Deuxième Sexe out of my back pocket to explain. I now think this might have pleased Beauvoir, who didn’t want to be remembered for a ...”

“... enough. Yet elsewhere, in a rare moment of apparent inadvertence, he paradoxically classifies the Norman monarchy after the Conquest as absolutist. There have been so many perverse claims for English exceptionalism in this period that it would be churlish to make too much of this contradiction. But it points to a more general problem. The tacit modulation ...”