“... that ‘Marvell’s prose was at least as important to civilisation as his poetry.’ In 2005 Nicholas von Maltzahn’s An Andrew Marvell Chronology, an essential handbook, brought the often murky or recalcitrant biographical materials to order and gave us the first rounded picture of his literary and political career. Not that Marvell will ever be easy ...”

“... which is currently showcasing the Stockists and their polemic exhibition, The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota. There are no other browsers when I visit the place, but the custodian is babbling on the phone: ‘It was a very cheap way to do up this building which was redundant.’ Drummond, responding to the requirement to ...”

“... the Carl Vinson: ‘There goes Dukes,’ said one of them whom I later spoke to. ‘He was the best Top Gun pilot of his generation, and what I would call a complete man,’ he said. I looked at hundreds of pictures of John Spahr over the months I spent looking for his story. Many of them showed him in the cockpit of his fighter plane: one with his visor ...”

“... of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the latter story was already in Cross and most of it in Dudden. Nevertheless, they have a fresh factual tang, sometimes marred by low-grade psychologising, as in the parenthetical suggestion that ‘psychologists would say ...”

“... battle-lines are not too clearly drawn. You can make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or ...”

“... guilt. This development has been intelligibly contested by advocates of civil liberties, but its best justification is that it probably does no more than corral within safe bounds something that the common sense of juries has always led them to do. Meanwhile, still writing on the blank sheet, one would have to turn to things the accused himself has said ...”

“... constitutes almost an alternative story. In the first place, Porter’s title is descriptive at best of the past 150 years of a 2500-year-long story, and arguably of only the past 60 or so. Before the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles ...”

“... he was his own boss, he threw himself into the pursuit, practising every day and seeking out the best opponents. He was a prince of exuberant physical energy, and had the height and weight to succeed at a sport so expensive and dangerous that it was still thought valid preparation for the battlefield. In jousting it’s only with a well-matched opponent that ...”

“... his ‘astonishing Vocal Illusions’ to the London public in a comedy called The Rogueries of Nicholas, featuring an accident-prone servant who runs on and off stage conducting serial dialogues with a vast imaginary cast including ailing Alderman Pillbury, amorous Captain Furlough, muling Pillbury Minimus and his big bouncy sister Flirtilla, along with ...”

“... translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of letters’ that they could ‘reade or reason … in Greke, Latine, Frenche, or Italian’. The spread of Greek literacy in the early 16th century changed the outlook of ...”

“... Free speech​ is an aberration – it is best to begin by admitting that. In most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed ...”

“... of Canetti’s internationalism, even his ‘Englishness’, his Shakespearean side, gives the best intuition that a non-Germanist can get of Kraus’s peculiar genius. It is, above all, a genius of commitment – to language and to emotion. That was the same with Kafka. How to combine, in art, a pure, fastidious rigour with the simplest feeling of rage ...”

“... his fear that the toil of his career and his frustrated love for Maud Gonne have consumed his best years. Cuchulain, however, suspects that the Old Man is trying to scare him away, and the two begin to wrangle, as their successors would in Purgatory. While water splashes on the stones, the Old Man sleeps and the hero is lured away by the hawk. The play ...”

“... and kind nurse. Appalled by Keats’s physical wretchedness and psychic disintegration, he did his best, wearing himself out to keep Keats alive, even against Keats’s will, even against the pressure of his own exhaustion. ‘I have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the ...”

“... time I heard him speak was over lunch, when someone mentioned an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. What we needed to know, Page piped up, was that the New York Times was prejudiced against his boss. We really didn’t need him to come all the way from Russia to tell us that. The mystery was what he could possibly be doing on the Trump ...”