“... with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a ...”

“... drowned. Anne Lister, in this as in much else, was an exception. She never ailed. As her uncle James, installed in melancholy grandeur in Shibden Hall, near Halifax, had followed the family pattern in remaining a bachelor, she found herself unexpectedly in line for the property. Lister proved herself the very woman to make the most of her good fortune. She ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... forbidden friend. Whereas Sophie von La Roche’s novel is one long rout of balls, formal games, frank exchanges of opinion, serious and less serious viewings of the heroine of the middle rank by the members of the aristocracy into which she fervently hopes to marry. Some of the difference of climate is also a difference of period: La Roche’s acknowledged ...”

“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that his wife (who tried to kill herself ...”

“... with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number one, but she was now singled out as an author who would reach for the very ceiling of ...”

“... Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any longer. A lot of these commentaries appeared online, some of them only ...”

“... notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place – the episodes that involved Crick and James Watson. Perutz’s role appears rather shady in Ferry’s account. As is fairly well known, Watson and Crick made use of unpublished data, from Rosalind Franklin’s rival group at King’s College London, in coming to their conclusions about the shape of ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... missile soon after Trump’s inauguration. The need for a change of tack should be clear. James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has admitted that Washington’s goal of pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme is ‘probably a lost cause’, and that ‘significant inducements’ will be required to deal with the ...”

“... cause of the reversal, the CIA was quick to claim credit for what the deputy CIA director Frank Wisner characterised as ‘a substantial victory for the West’. The US had saved Iran from the clutches of communism, and as far as it was concerned, it alone deserved the credit. The British had been helpful, but Iran was now an American show. The time ...”

“... in 1974, Gunn met Ty’s ‘gorgeous big’ doorman, Allan Noseworthy. He was warm, generous, frank, fun, a voracious reader and a hopeless romantic. He wrote to Gunn of one guy: ‘I’ve found myself thinking about him 18 hrs a day (the six that I don’t are when I’m reading).’ Gunn found Noseworthyflighty, highly strung, at times silly, but so ...”

“... the book warns, ‘may kill us yet’. The distinction between fiction and myth is discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending. Roughly speaking, myths are fictions that have forgotten their own fictional status and taken themselves as real. Liberals like Brooks fear being imprisoned by their own convictions, or oppressed by the convictions of ...”

“... critics of Lawrence have seen their task as something similar: a matter of showing him, as Frank Kermode put it, ‘taming metaphysic by fiction’. Part of Lawrence would have approved of this approach. He thought that all novelists of consequence (‘even Balzac’) had ‘a didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy’, and that this was precisely ...”

“... Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public ...”