“... As one thinks of Harold Bloom, Auden’s description of Wyndham Lewis as a lonely old volcano comes to mind. Though not, like Lewis, ‘of the Right’, or indeed claiming any political alignment, Bloom erupts with comparable regularity and force. He prefers to be a one-man cultural opposition, waving only the banner of aesthetics; he says there are no Bloomians, but everybody knows him and all wonder, usually with exasperated affection, what he will do next ...”

“... The ‘misunderstandings’ over Westlands were attributed to those civil servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after Crichel Down, however, all the House of Commons and the country seem to do is to shrug its collective ...”

“... which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes.’ Redhill Rococo and Striker offer something in the way of light relief. Idiocy has filtered down and its symptoms are ...”

“... Berry’s death in 1927 may have left Wharton ‘utterly rudderless’, as she wrote to Bernard Berenson; but she still managed to get into his Paris apartment and to burn almost all the letters she had ever written to him. ‘No words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest ...”

“... of the celestial clockwork. That was in the 17th century. Now medicine has become, in the words of Lewis Thomas, the youngest science; and the kind of wanton incompetence that did for Josef Shklovsky has passed into history, at least in the West. Or has it? In 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Society published the results of a study on 100 deaths, all ...”

“... just as Albert’s radiant bride or the reclusive widow of Windsor, but as the imperious queens of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, an ageless mother in a child’s alphabet book, even a dominatrix of pornographic fantasy. As Munich reads them, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are haunted by her presence, and so too is Rider Haggard’s She, whose deathless queen ...”

“... only expensive ones if I can.’ He finds that the reviews of two biographies (of Auden and of Day-Lewis) ‘have been nearly as interesting as the books themselves’. He misses no tricks, though it seems to me that he wins fewer than he used to. He strives: ‘To be witty does not necessarily mean to crack wise.’ He insists on being burly, reassuringly ...”

“... Bernard de Fallois​ , a legendary French editor and publisher, died in January 2018. He worked for a long time at Hachette, and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering doing postgraduate work on Proust; he said in one of the lectures now published as Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust that he had been ‘tempted to conduct … a university exercise that one calls a thesis’, and the wording alone tells us a lot ...”

“... Isabelle McClung, for whom, she declared, all her books had been written, and the editor Edith Lewis, who lived with her for 39 years.In the valley between major biographies, we often get more personal, soft-focus ones, which centre on smaller, more manageable aspects of the life and work. The late 1980s yielded three tomes in quick succession: Sharon ...”

“... father, he was ‘trained in war long before’ 1914. Back in London, he hooked up with Wyndham Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, who had by this time split from Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop in order to set up their own group, which became the Rebel Art Centre. Nevinson’s paintings grew more geometrical, and soon incorporated Futurist techniques such as ...”

“... letters, telegrams, personal expostulations and, above all, telephone calls – what the late Sir Lewis Namier called ‘the terror by telephone’. He was himself a skilled operator of this weapon and claimed to have reduced more than one critic of Zionism to a nervous breakdown. The only safe course is never, never, never to have any opinion about the ...”

“... some theologians in the Fifties to works such as The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature: C.S. Lewis, for example, condemned ‘merely aesthetic’ interpretation of the Bible as a way of dodging its religious claims. But Lewis was not a Biblical scholar, and it would be hard to find a single example of anyone engaged in ...”

“... décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ...”

“... left its mark on her – apparent, perhaps, in the account of the King’s Road fiasco. R.W.B. Lewis, Mrs Wharton’s biographer, and editor in 1988 of a selection of her letters, has noticed her ‘displaying in her earliest recorded comments on James clear signs of a restiveness of influence’. Even at the point of becoming one of the Master’s ...”

“... discovered that May (who was by then married to Henry Sparling) was having an affair with George Bernard Shaw. Shaw moved into the couple’s house, which shocked Lily; she resigned and never saw May again. Meanwhile, Lolly began training as a Froebel teacher in 1889, and proved very successful: six years later, her first book Brushwork, which outlined her ...”