“... are about these difficulties, it’s that they are them; the surprising thing is not that Harris took 11 years to write Hannibal, but that he managed to do it at all. Given all this, there is something oneiric, or uncanny, about the extent of Hannibal’s popular success. In the UK, the publishers having printed 175,000 hardbacks, a further 71,000 copies ...”

“... man in earnest’), and while not, perhaps, a truly great critic, he made a stand against what he took to be the intellectual cowardice of musicologists reluctant to indulge in value-judgments, but more than willing to barricade themselves behind an allegedly neutral musical antiquarianism. Profesor Kerman is uninterested in the intellectual jungle of ...”

“... her son with something like love. For the first time, she felt the pride of their connection. She took his arm. This is melodrama, of course, but the internal melodrama is balanced by and juxtaposed with the partly-farcical external melodrama of the blind magician at the fête; the outer world is as grotesque as the inner, and both are more credible for ...”

“... was mixed, ‘at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic’. The figurative elements were what he took to be pure pictographs, or signs bearing an unequivocal resemblance to the items in the world whose names they stood for; the phonetic signs, whether or not they bore, rebus-like, a resemblance to some material object, were there for a different ...”

“... the Sun, had played a central role in beating Labour in the 1992 general election. When Blair took over as leader in 1994, he had an overwhelming sense that he needed to court the press, in particular the party’s traditional enemies on the right. As he said in 2000, Under Thatcher . . . they got drunk on the power she let them wield and then they ...”

“... them when they grew up. Because Kingsley had never pretended to be someone he wasn’t, and never took on a paternal role out of a sense of obligation, there seems to have been less distance to overcome when Martin was older. It’s a portrait of a remarkably close, easy and above all honest relationship. Experience recounts tremendous arguments (‘the ...”

“... I imagine, who stayed with the intriguing literary eminence kindly characterised, eventually, in John Sutherland’s biography.* Nevertheless, a suspicion persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and damaging New Yorker ...”

“... administration, who flocked to the new apartments. In 1967, the Democratic National Committee took over the sixth floor of the 11-storey office building. Here, on the night of 17 June 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the ...”

“... a jump, a whistle and a fart.Roland fits poorly with the image of medieval minstrels that later took hold. In the 18th and 19th centuries early entertainers were depicted either as quasi-religious bards who plucked their harps at court while intoning the histories of their people, or as romantic wanderers who earned their keep with love songs. In their own ...”

“... John Gibson​ was born in 1827 in rural Ireland. He went to sea at the age of twelve – the family were poor – but at 34 settled as a grocer in St Mary’s, the largest of the Scilly Isles. His business grew, and in 1870 he opened a photographic portrait studio attached to the shop. He had taken a course in Plymouth and was now equipped to shoot the people of the isles ...”

“... of the Larkin biography attending a fancy-dress party in 1941 dressed as an SS officer. Nobody took much notice. Today it would seem a vicious provocation or an act of tasteless bravado. Humour and ridicule, antidote and disinfectant, have all become politicised. Larkin’s independence, or irresponsibility, is all the more striking because it was always ...”

“... trying to remember How and Who, When and Where, the reader might be forgiven for wondering why it took the author so ...”

“... since there never was a defence version, but with those parts removed to which the defence took exception. What is surprising is that such a hazardous and indirect method of establishing a narrative comes off at all: in fact, in point of coherence and readability, it comes off rather well. But there is no doubt that the Sunday Times version acquits the ...”

“... she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real banality. The Lady of Shalott took drastic measures in terms of art when the curse of living came upon her. Lolita survives her enchanting nymphetude, and for a while is as interesting as a dull little wife as she was when presenting Humbert Humbert with his destiny. Brookner takes the dire ...”

“... the political scandals of the early 1990s, the counter-revolution was swift and brutal. Berlusconi took power, the judges were tamed and many investigations simply petered out. As recent scandals in the business world have shown – above all the collapse of the dairy company Parmalat in circumstances similar to the collapse of Enron – corrupt systems of ...”