“... the longer term it would be necessary to enable him to enter a scientific path,’ a nice way of saying he should be shunted into academia, where he was already studying part-time. The problem was evidently that he was a Jew, and specifically that his father – always a man of Zionist sympathies, with a daughter in Israel – had visited the ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to Wyeth himself, offering to curate the show in return for a nice Wyeth watercolour that Henry would personally select. Much to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the ...”

“... of the 21st Lancers enjoyed himself thoroughly. ‘I am ready for another man-killing job. It is nice to put a sword or a lance through a man; they are just like old hens, they just say “Quar!”’ The savagery of these battles was unavoidable given the close nature of the conflict and the relentlessness of the enemy attacks. The defeat of the Egyptian ...”

“... white man, vote for me, and even that Sanders implicitly conveyed that message. The Vox journalist David Roberts did a word-frequency analysis on Clinton’s campaign speeches and concluded that she mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 ...”

“... the end of Allelujah! (and slightly to my surprise) there comes another prison garden. It would be nice to think that this vision is somewhere near the truth, but I wouldn’t bank on it. 4 June. We rehearse in King’s Bench Street in Blackfriars and today the actors sit in a circle and one by one tell the life stories of their characters insofar as they can ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr Swan, Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric, really a very nice old man, who wanted to see the Amazon before he died, asked, ‘What’s that ugly thing?’ This closing vignette is the genuine Bishop of the Brazilian phase. There is in evidence no injured vanity, no condemnation of the admirably humanised Mr Swan ...”

“... Red and Whites several times. His family – skilled working class, not badly off, able to afford nice Sunday suits for the children – briefly retreated to Kursk, in Russia, where Brezhnev joined the Komsomol and then, at 25, the Communist Party. He married Viktoria Petrovna, a midwifery student, and worked as a land manager before the party sent him to the ...”

“... Mary de Rachewiltz (Pound’s daughter by the American violinist Olga Rudge), and Joanna and David Moody (who is at work on a multi-volume biography of Pound) have chosen to include every message from the poet to his parents in its entirety, however mundane. I suppose one might pause to note from the above the extent to which Pound was open to sharing ...”

“... war. As Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister at the time, put it: ‘We won the war and received a nice dowry of territory, but along with a bride whom we don’t like.’ Israel had to decide what to do with the bride, and what to do with the dowry. The Middle East still lives in the shadow of the decisions Israel made – and those it didn’t – in the ...”

“... I ask you a question?’ he said. ‘Can I ask you what you thought of me when I was a kid?’ ‘Nice,’ said Mr Simpson, rocking. ‘A quiet boy.’ Brian Simpson’s sister looks after him. She brought us tea and a plastic tub of biscuits. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I remember’ – and his hands beat a semaphore, as if guiding the words into the room ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”