“... time. At one point he gently shows himself as a callow, would-be writer merely by referring to ‘John Keats and Alfred Tennyson’ – two real writers sporting their Christian names like new ties. The landlady in ‘Fate, Art, Love, and George’ is named from Oscar Wilde. She is Miss Bunbury and keeps old personal columns with certain appointments ...”

“... to observe the sorting of the ashes, has been rightly praised. I also enjoyed his letter to St John Ervine in response to the news that Ervine had lost a leg. He told Ervine it reminded him of the time in 1898-9 when he himself had been on crutches and dragging a useless limb about. ‘Now do those eighteen months stand out in my memory as a period of ...”

“... taxes on America, in the shape of the Townshend Acts of 1767 (to which other Americans like John Dickinson and Samuel Adams responded with ever more ingenious arguments like the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, as against tax them), Franklin wrote his son William ‘that no middle doctrine can be well maintained ... Something might be ...”

“... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob Geldof ...”

“... the stories in Black Tickets, these ones provide a somewhat over-cultivated performance, such as John Updike is famous for. But there are black tickets to another kind of performance, where the story is indeed all performance, in one of the modes of post-modernist fiction, and voluntarily severs itself from the old modes of observation or criticism of ...”

“... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an ...”

“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... and in his final years he also produced paintings of great pathos, but even in the Beheading of St John Caravaggio does not deepen our conviction, or raise our conception, of divine rapture or inspiration or virtue. Nor does he ever exhibit any beauty that is not mundane. The painting which perhaps best exemplifies the qualities Caravaggio lacked is The Last ...”

“... shy: she could even invite herself to tea with a famous stranger, the reluctant and unenthusiastic John Galsworthy. But in spite of the advantage of her looks and social courage she could not, in Forster’s sense, ‘connect’. She attributes this to ‘lack of insight into the lives of others. I was curious, I “observed” them, but was insensitive to ...”

“... you regard poker as a matter of life or death?’ He replied: ‘Hell, no, cards is serious.’ John Stockley Pomeroy is a West Point graduate who has left the Army and put in some time in the Yukon. The period is the turn of the century. The new books are The Four Feathers and The Ambassadors. The first oilfield in Texas has just gushed, Orville and Wilbur ...”

“... as he had been when Jenkins took it in the first place. It is the facetiousness that annoys. Is John Pilger really so dreadful? Can the Stephen Waldorf affair be taken lightly? Does Johnson have to talk about Greenham women as if he were an agent of Lord Gnome? The British Library will catalogue him under ‘Anecdotes, facetiae, satire etc’ – which is ...”

“... admiration for the Poles. I remember, one Sunday morning, watching the installation of Pope John Paul II with Foucault and a friend – all three of us ex-Catholics – on Michel’s minuscule black-and-white television set. I was struck at the time by the fascination with which he watched the proceedings. Quite apart from delight in the ‘camp’ of ...”

“... feel one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort ...”

“... absurd posturing ninny. Yet this was also the Golden Age of Spanish literature, the century of St John of the Cross, Lope, Quevedo, Góngora. Byron has read widely in the secondary literature and he deftly captures the multiple contradictions. He is also good at the set-pieces, such as the Battle of Lepanto or the horrors of an Algerian jail. As one reads ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”