“... almost, the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme falters somewhat when we reach the Don as ...”

“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied the ...”

“... they tell you things you did not know and are unlikely to find out in more conventional quarters. Henry Kissinger is Hitchens’s pet loathing and the catalogue of his doings an essential element in Hitchens’s analysis of the American state. The essays on Kissinger should be read with ‘Songs Fit for Heroes’, a reflection on ‘the recreational songbock ...”

“... Clune’s memoir opens a few years into his habit. He is visiting some addict friends, Dominic and Henry, in Baltimore. Henry has one arm; Dominic has a syringe sticking out of his neck. Clune has come to ask them for OxyContin, but what he really wants is heroin, ‘the white thing’. He sees a ‘half-empty white-topped ...”

“... Ackroyd makes an intense and memorable logic of such phantasmagoria, in a novel remarkable for power, ingenuity and subtlety alike. The historic span of Paradise Postponed is that of post-war England, as witnessed chiefly by the family of a fashionable left-wing cleric named Simeon Simcox. The story looks back from his death in 1985 and, neatly and ...”

“... who dream it can be turned to dollar-fodder. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy to the power of roughly n, in that Gay Talese is going to make more money out of writing about pornography than any poor buck-a-fuck hack ever made out of writing pornography itself. Thus, in its distastefully complete self-containment, Thy Neighbour’s Wife is the ...”

“... contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting ...”

“... on and so on for 672 pages of murders, freak-outs, double-crosses, celebrity cameos and shifting power relationships between the three protagonists, eventually culminating in the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Ellroy has said in interviews that he now aims to avoid ‘psycho-sexually driven’ plots and ‘show a greater diversity of ...”

“... recent employment was as a librettist of light operatic pantomimes. Nor was it due to the drawing power of the celebrated Barton Booth, who had been billed to play the lead role of Julio but was too ill from jaundice to appear. What drew the crowds to Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for ...”

“... a number of unattractive characteristics, but allowed a spirit of self-criticism that was healthy. Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This ...”

“... changing, both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... have nothing, but the two best historians of the early 12th century, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, say that Harold’s eye was pierced by an arrow, one making this his death-wound, while the other has him sinking to the ground, where he is finished off by horsemen; William adds that a cavalryman was disgraced for hacking at the corpse’s ...”

“... whether Fanny Price should or should not accept the rakish – but seemingly reformed – charmer Henry Crawford. She doesn’t, as it happens, but the narrator tells us that she certainly would have, had things played out slightly differently or taken a bit longer to unravel: ‘Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a ...”

“... as the circulation figures rise, and as the ‘key targets’ in Baghdad fall victim to allied air power, so caution is thrown to the winds and the papers stoke up the war fever they helped to create in the first place. What is most remarkable about the press coverage of the Gulf crisis is its unanimity. Those who run the Sun and the Star will always support a ...”