“... fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first choice as administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, soon after taking command, purged its website entry on climate change. (More than a year later, if you go to epa.gov/climatechange you are told the page is still being ‘being updated’ to ‘reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times at home. Their Glaswegian father John’s business putting up electric party illuminations in the gardens of the West London gentry never recovered from the blackouts after the zeppelin raids, and the financial help the family got from his wife’s father, a one-time miner turned wealthy ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... taught too, for a time. What she wanted, she says fiercely, was to live.One day she is teaching Scott Fitzgerald, the scene where the murderer finds Gatsby in the pool. Raw sunlight and scarcely created grass, the old warm world. She admired the passage and made dutiful notes on it.But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved simplicity ...”

“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an ...”

“... larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone reader, it is inseparable from the character-space of the novel, and its ...”

“... of a certain sort because, up till then, any book that captured my interest, such as a novel by Scott or Dickens, or by Kingsley or Harrison Ainsworth, or even by the much despised and now completely forgotten Jeffrey Farnol, whose daintiness deeply offended me, I would pick up, and starting on page 1, I would race through it as fast as my eyes could carry ...”

“... level-headed than the fantasies woven around the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro in The Internationalists (2017), which traces the blessings of today’s ruled-based order to the schemes of assorted US bankers and Wall Street lawyers for universal peace in the same years, in a ne plus ultra of empty American ...”

“... phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense tiresome and ...”

“... country house in which he is seated on the lawn as one of an assorted company, including John Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Peter Howard and Professor Joad, of prospective Parliamentary candidates. Three years later, when Mosley was starting to move towards Fascism, there were some letters, which are extant, in which my father sought reassurance from ...”

“... Hong Kong. A clever scholarship boy of Irish ancestry who grew up in West London, he shares with John Major a modest show-business background – his father published a pop hit, ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly Hooly Skirt’. ‘We were low-to-lower middle class. I can describe these gradations with laserlike accuracy,’ Patten told his New Yorker ...”