“... made inexorable forever.’ Concessions would be granted for limited opportunity as for limited powers. Our loving father knows ‘how far the means of grace have been afforded’ a man. He willingly admits ‘every real extenuation of our failings and transgressions’. This position, which fairly well completes Johnson’s moral scaffolding, meets the ...”

“... as implied, for example, in the Tebbit Bill: it is not that abroad the legal or economic powers of unions are more restricted, it is that ‘unlike the British they do not wish to use them in ways damaging to the nation in general and their members in particular.’ Furthermore, the unions are not really to blame for these attitudes. They have ...”

“... capable of surprisingness, there is always more to say. In that sense he is Shakespearean: his powers give power to others. Though the canon is already formidable, these new studies all add to it in different ways and suggest something new going on. For newness, of a unique kind, is perpetually immanent in Dostoevsky, always on the verge of breaking ...”

“... they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’ The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... experience is China, which he never visited as prime minister, but where for many years the powers-that-be seem to have imagined that he remained the paramount leader of Britain. He records no fewer than 22 visits there, parlaying with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. As far as we know, these visits achieved absolutely nothing, except the loan of some ...”

“... the 1980s by a touch of incestuous and homo-erotic feeling. Writing in the New Republic in 1979, Richard Hall faulted the five-volume biography for manifesting ‘a peculiar timidity at the centre of the work’. What was missing from Edel’s account, according to Hall, was not so much James’s ‘homo-erotic bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in ...”

“... Tim, personally, and if you’re an American, you could hack it with no loss of status: Tim Powers, the Steampunk, or Tim O’Brien with a safely macho Vietnam novel, If I Die in a Combat Zone. There were even saddlebums with clean fingernails called Tim. Tim Holt, for example, went unwashed and unshaved through the badlands in films like The Treasure ...”

“... former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of ...”

“... different piece on the piano in case his memory attracted attention. Even more impressive were his powers of improvisation. Though he thought extemporising in public an ‘absurdity’, it was his stock-in-trade. In private, on one of his many visits to London, he wowed a nine-year-old pianist with 20 spontaneous variations on ‘Bluebells of ...”

“... starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended ...”

“... painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the young Troy Donahue ...”

“... Socialist Realism and the realism of contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, who celebrate ‘the total fetishisation of object relations’, but maintains a more ambiguous relationship with formalism in which he ‘attempts to imbue abstract painting with a mnemonic dimension, commemorating, if nothing else, at least its ...”

“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...”

“... in Fraser’s words), government money flowed in and production was massively ramped up. The Axis powers were out-smelted, but at a cost: out of the effluent-saturated Northwest of the 1940s and 1950s, Fraser contends, arose ‘the greatest generation of serial killers’. From the age of four, Bundy was breathing particulates from the Ruston smokestack ...”