“... this summer. On 29 June, after Stella Creasy put forward an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, Philip Hammond announced that Northern Irish women who travelled to England for an abortion could for the first time have that abortion paid for by the NHS, like every other citizen and taxpayer of the UK. Sixteen ‘terminations of pregnancy’ officially took ...”

“... aureus has not had the attention it deserved because its list of famous victims is so short. Even famous illnesses caused by it have escaped bacteriological attribution. Queen Victoria’s armpit abscess in 1871 poured pus for days after it was cut open by Joseph Lister. All that is remembered is the carbolic spray getting into her ...”

“... of fiction as an autonomous category, neither factual truth nor reprehensible lies. As Philip Sidney would later put it, ‘the poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’ In Book 15, Boccaccio goes on to establish an Italian literary canon, seamlessly linking ancients and moderns, Latin and vernacular writers, culminating in ...”

“... Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the short, iconoclastic critical article. The ...”

“... of academic life, Stepping Westward and The History Man? I wondered, pondering his claim that in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire, the old woman who claims to have been Kafka’s whore ‘concentrates the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of ...”

“... conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the people who knew ...”

“... and condescension, then their subjects might remain loyal and deferential to them in return. In short, this book describes how the royal family, by a mixture of lucky accident and conscious design, came to exploit the reciprocal potentialities in the gift relationship as part of their strategy for survival in an increasingly uncertain world. More ...”

“... must be in some sense unbalanced. The last US Ambassador to Havana (the liberal-minded diplomat Philip Bonsal) concluded that Castro was ‘power mad’ and lacked normal human sociability. In the most florid passage of his memoirs, referring to the period just before the final break in diplomatic relations in 1960, Bonsal invokes ‘the magnetic ...”

“... remarkable philosophical meditation, often poignant in its belatedness; and as a letter to Philip Roth. ‘The history of Jewish literacy: now there is a delicate subject!’ Wieseltier exclaims. ‘It turns out that rabbis have been complaining for centuries that the book has often been closed to the people of the book.’ It might seem a bit offhand ...”

“... Clementine, however, in 1935, while on a Pacific cruise, had a platonic affair with Terence Philip, a worldly and handsome art dealer, which Mary Soames frankly recounts in one of her editorial interventions, but to which there is no reference in the letters. ‘Don’t be disloyal to me in thought,’ writes Churchill to Clementine from HMS Enchantress ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... by the elegant, modernising leader of the Ethiopians, Ras Tafari Makonnen, a.k.a. Haile Selassie. Short, combative and mischievous, Steer arrived in Addis in July, equipped with a typewriter, a shotgun and tropical kit. The temptation to graft him onto Scoop is strong: the war had yet to start and he was one of dozens of journalists holed up in the Hotel ...”

“... read about the murder that week, on the day he finished a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Carrère, writer, père de famille, and Romand’s contemporary, finally decided that the only person who could answer the questions that had begun to trouble him was Romand himself. Six months after the murders he wrote to Romand in ...”

“... including Bethe. When Bethe himself was put to the test by an assault on his Cornell colleague, Philip Morrison, he sprang to Morrison’s defence, though it was perhaps less daunting for Bethe to stand up to a university committee of inquiry than it was for Oppenheimer to face down the rampaging House Committee on Un-American Activities. And, while ...”

“... biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President Burr tells Schuyler, ‘the man who does not know where he is going goes farthest. Talleyrand used to tell me that for the great man all is accident. Obviously, he was ...”