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“... 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 ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual passion, found obvious echoes in his own character. Sparrow was also co-author of A.E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List, one of the few excursions into modern bibliography made by this great collector, 17th century bibliographer and connoisseur of Renaissance Latin, who counselled aspiring bibliomaniacs: (1) never lend anyone a book; (2) never sell a book; (3) never give anyone a book; (4) never read a book ...”

“... 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 ...”