“... among other things from nominal amnesia, a high-flown name for forgetfulness. Short-lived, I may say – the name or date comes back to me within a few minutes. But I can hardly stand staring at the camera for all that time. I can’t think what to do. Make something up, I suppose. There is a serious trouble in my life quite apart from Parkinson’s ...”

“... fact, did not mean very much. When, once, he wore a false nose at the dinner table, it was not, we may be fairly sure, to rebuke his guest the Marchesa Casati for wearing inch-long false eyelashes. It was merely a jape, country-house prankishness. His verbal wit, it is true, sometimes had a little more edge, in the Noël Coward style. I liked: ‘Complaining ...”

“... we slip into the equally moralistic language of conspiracy. At the very least, this shorthand may conflate outcomes and intentions, professions and practice. More seriously, it readily conjures up a highly distorted picture of the agencies of political power, suggesting a monolithic plenitude of power: in reality, what counts for most in an intricate and ...”

“... her a note that showed not one iota of what I wanted it to say, but Thank you … magical … and may I have the pleasure, etc, on New Year’s Eve? She came, her bloom irradiating my grey room. The bortsch was good, the wine was better, a candle flame danced in the draught, pirouetting when we laughed. How far that little candle … laughter … Tatyana’s ...”

“... of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none will do scant justice to the work of one of the most perceptive of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere ...”

“... context for, but do not in any way extend, the preoccupations of the major books. Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to literature, Empson used those ...”

“... US Government, the countervailing – and heroic – contestations of workers and peasants. Some may consider the approach theoretically crude (Hart’s classes sometimes behave in pretty mechanistic fashion, and his individual actors carry class labels tacked on to their names, reminding us of their ineluctable destinies), but at least we know where we ...”

“... kept the NKVD supplied with secret intelligence from 1941 onwards, but this keen sense of shame may have been sufficient punishment for his crimes. For Annan the treason which began the long post-war decline derived from another source. As he acknowledges, when it came to traitors such as Long, ‘the Establishment imposed a pall of silence,’ but this ...”

“... a large loose bag into which she can pop odd pieces of narrative embroidery? Such questions may help to explain the unsatisfactoriness of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s recent novels. Or simpler explanations may be more pertinent: waning energy, for example, and the loss, or abandonment, of her real – her serious ...”

“... is sophisticated and complex. Certain literary works, or even a whole literary ‘tradition’ may find ways of representing such conflicting chronologies. In a sense, this is true of Wuthering Heights and of Heathcliff in particular. For both the house and the character belong definitively to the world of the realist novel, with its ...”

“... from the Midlands and charismatic energumen called Robert Catesby, called a meeting on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the ...”

“... too strong a whiff of the midnight oil about the phrases (and even the jokes) that he employed. He may not have had the authority or gravitas of his immediate predecessor, Jo Grimond, but he seldom failed to entertain his audience. Even within his own Party he was often thought to be a lightweight; but that never struck me as wholly fair. He had a consistent ...”

“... relations, relations that are both local and wide-ranging, from the personal link a seduction poem may both draw upon and forge with the person being seduced to the more distant connection a text makes when a reader, contemplating the work long decades after it was written, is himself or herself moved to write about it. I am most interested in how and why ...”

“... family – the President’s wife and sons had been among his students. But Saad, like Falstaff, may have known his President too well and not well enough. When he publicly warned against the possibility of Mubarak grooming one of his sons to succeed him, he was arrested, as an object-lesson to other would-be activists. Mubarak perhaps did not so much ...”

“... with the Japanese-American family cannot all be Japanese-Americans. Indeed, part of the point may be to redress a kind of ignorance other than that of the historical events themselves, which, despite the publisher’s claim that Otsuka’s book explores ‘unfamiliar’ history, are well documented. Not only has there been extensive historical ...”