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“... the later pages of the book are sprinkled with famous names – John Barrymore, Burl Ives and Frank Sinatra all have walk-on parts – the only literary figure who appears is John Buchan, and that as Governor General of Canada. Fox has said she ‘knew certain people, like Alfred Kazin and the Trillings and Philip Roth, but we didn’t have literary ...”

“... had been cut off. It turned out to be a false economy on the Duke’s part. Yet to say, as James Laver did, introducing the 1929 edition, that there was ‘no creative impulse’ behind the Memoirs is quite untrue. Once she got going Harriette Wilson clearly wrote for the pleasure of writing. Many of the people she depicts are obscure; she simply ...”

“... Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion – means the inquiry has been limited to ‘gists’, though Chilcot says these will be ‘sufficient to explain our conclusions’. There were further delays because of the need to declassify thousands of documents; this wasn’t completed ...”

“... lacking in ‘industry and perseverance’ in business matters, to borrow from his description of Frank Clare, the worthless young love interest in No Name, and began to write and publish fiction. At 22, as his father was dying, he was sent to read law at Lincoln’s Inn; he spent his time there working on his second novel manuscript. On his father’s death ...”

“... silence, a few people made remarks like: “Well, it worked.”’ Indeed, Oppenheimer’s brother Frank thought that’s what Robert actually said as soon as the atomic thunder permitted intelligible speech: ‘It worked.’ That sounds about right: the scientists and engineers had spent over two years trying to make an atomic bomb that worked and the test ...”

“... Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been overcome. Today, however, American ...”

“... of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by Eisenhower to become his chief of Intelligence; and ...”

“... and a contemporary woodcut from Germany labelled ‘the two great impostors’ shows him facing James Nayler, the messianic English Quaker. Nayler had entered Bristol like Jesus entering Jerusalem, on the back of an ass. His followers walked behind him and a sign proclaimed him King of the Jews. His movement had effects right across Europe, the Middle East ...”

“... moment. And unlike actual generals and politicians, he would be thoughtful, truthful, eloquent and frank. He would share with the television audience what he was doing and what he was hoping to accomplish. Then at the end of each show a narrator would say: ‘What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with the events that alter and illuminate our ...”

“... was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives are ...”

“... a little magazine named after one of Roussel’s works, Locus Solus: Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were collaborators. It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a ...”

“... Miller has overslept’. Whether the reference to Gay Talese’s famous Esquire piece, ‘Frank Sinatra has a cold’, was intentional hardly matters. The line has been used in so many cover stories it has become its own trope.Despite the big claims and obvious changes, it’s difficult to imagine the print magazine carrying on for much longer in its ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... of his life. 21 April. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper ...”

“... on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes ...”