“... The​ Pillow Book was written in Japan more than a thousand years ago. Little is known about its author, Sei Shonagon, save for what can be deduced from the text itself. In 993, when she was in her late twenties, she joined the court of Empress Teishi. During the Heian period (794-1186), ‘empress’ was a flexible term: Teishi was merely the first among a number of consorts with that title, each with her own entourage, each competing to find favour with the emperor and bear a future sovereign ...”

“... should let the new Caucasian republics ‘cut each other’s throats’. The foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, said he was ‘in favour of that’ so long as ‘Batum, Baku, the railway between them and the pipeline’ were protected.When Baku fell to the Red Army in 1920, Azerbaijan and its oilfields were subsumed into the Soviet Union. The vast resources ...”

“... the imaginary creatures of an author is somehow – well, ‘uncritical’. The fact is, Wall has little time for the Trollope critics. One of the striking features of his book is its thinness of scholarly reference. Trollope and Character is, I guess, the longest work of commentary on the author ever written. It has no bibliography and just twenty terse ...”

“... ventriloquism of an octave.There was, of course, an unofficial Britten, one we choristers knew little about. This one was not the coaxer of communities but perhaps their opponent or dissident. He was the committed pacifist and conscientious objector, the creator of the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940),♪ commissioned and then rejected by the Japanese ...”

“... of the many, not the few – will be merciless on 8 June.’ But then, ten days later, a little jittery: ‘Theresa May needs to up her election game as Labour’s “freebie manifesto” is starting to fool some.’ By 1 June, as the polls skid, there is a discernible note of panic: ‘Theresa May must spell out why voters should choose her – not ...”

“... she wrote in the final song on her debut album.) Subsequently, she mythologised her daughter as ‘Little Green’ (‘call her green for the children who have made her’). The glamour of Mitchell’s words made loss beautiful and forgiveness possible. ‘You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed/...”

“... accusation is unclear. He alludes in a footnote to Berlin’s support for the Vietnam War but says little else about his subjects’ supposed hawkish tendencies. Perhaps he is suggesting, reasonably enough, that some Cold War liberals, in their focus on Soviet wrongdoing, ignored or denied or soft-pedalled crimes committed by the US and its allies. In any ...”

“... a 19th-century cowboy paraphrasing Swift (‘They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance’); eerier still to see a distorted after-image of King Lear set loose in a Western desert, ‘like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die’. In another cultural ...”

“... was lucky to have Robert, but then Charlotte Brontë was perhaps equally lucky to have had Arthur Nicholls. Had Charlotte lived, she might have continued to write good things as private woman and happy spouse, blissfully submitting her letters and manuscripts to her husband’s censorship. Elizabeth was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving ...”

“... far worse than to be thought of as no good. Not that he lacked literary vanity. He monitored the little magazines as fiercely as he checked out the mass-market press. And he was forever getting into literary quarrels, taking offence, taking revenge. He fought with the exiting Georgians; he fought with the incoming highbrow avant-garde. Osbert wanted – and ...”

“... in their allegiances than most of us? It seems impossible even to guess intelligently but there is little evidence that they were. It is the twenty-odd years before the First World War that most catch the eye. This was when the Apostles were something like a recruiting agency for what we loosely call Bloomsbury, but what we ought perhaps to acknowledge as a ...”

“... department where he was employed, and a few other things. There is no new philosophy here, and little news about the opinions, or even the development of ideas, of either author. It is symptomatic that the editor begins the book with an imaginary dialogue of his own composition, in which the protagonists are named ‘Lakatos’ and ‘Feyerabend’. It is ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... in 1914 with the International Brigaders, MacDiarmid writes: Despite the undeniable honesty, the little literary gift, What is Sherston’s Progress but an exposure Of the eternal Englishman Incapable of rising above himself, And traditional values winning out Over an attempted independence of mind. MacDiarmid is both right and wrong. Sherston’s Progress ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who volunteered for service in the British Army even after the Easter Rising in 1916) occur only at the ...”