“... a fellow Yorkshireman, telling him: ‘It would have made a difference, you know’). But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking Harold Macmillan to inquire of his minister of defence what could be done to ‘suppress or even get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher’, his outlook and instincts were profoundly ...”

“... that Hitler won her over by giving the ‘most thrilling compliments’. Lines such as: ‘May I invite you to the opera, Miss Eva? I am always surrounded by men, you see, so I know very well how much the pleasure of a woman’s company is worth.’ The real attraction seems to have been the chance to cast herself in a starring role at the centre of ...”

“... order in Italy. Hirschman was at one with the movement’s purpose but fast losing any taste he may have had for isms. Colorni confirmed him in that and the two men committed themselves to what Colorni called ‘little ideas’, making a pact ‘to prove Hamlet wrong’: doubt, they believed, could make one more certain about how to be. Adelman gives the ...”

“... friendly texts from Tony Blair (‘I’m no use on police stuff but call me after that because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character ...”

“... through the corridors of a hotel or to and from the house of an absent friend-cum-rival whom he may or may not have murdered, its obsessive attention to surfaces and objects, or the geometric pulsing of a lighthouse’s ‘cône fulgurant de clarté’ through the black night, over and over – in all these aspects, the ...”

“... and you think of roses. A jasmine scent, and you think of jasmine blossom. The representations may be better or worse – you may smell a rose perfume and think: this smells nothing like real roses – but they are imitations even so, however pale. The genius of Chanel No. 5, invented by Coco Chanel in collaboration with ...”

“... high sustained string note on a film soundtrack. If the book doesn’t cast an immediate spell it may be partly a matter of page layout. Its paragraphs are substantial and sometimes enormous, occasionally passing the five-page mark though never the ten. The withholding of a pause on the page, a symbolic breathing space, is an indispensable aspect of some ...”

“... any kind of pro-German conspiracy. And in her defence, she was no Diana Mosley. Waldorf may have been one of the first in Britain to meet with Hitler face to face, but it was not from any love of National Socialism. Waldorf wrote to the Times to defend the Cliveden house parties and to insist that he and ‘Lady Astor’ were ‘no more ...”

“... cheques usually follow. But not long after these happy moments – unreasonably soon, the writer may feel – congratulations fade away and the obvious question begins to appear: ‘What are you working on now?’ Heller, whose big book was slow to reach the stage of unqualified runaway success, learned to dread the obvious question. He had a title for his ...”

“... on the poem, is a French slang term for lesbian that gained currency in the 1920s and 1930s. It may have derived from the fashion for dressing up in male evening dress in beau monde lesbian circles during this period – tuxedo-wearers were often compared to pingouins. Bishop’s Penelope Gwin (or Pen Gwin) travels light, carrying with her only two ...”

“... So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject’s: ‘No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me ...”

“... administered with a smile of feigned hospitality; and, whatever tactical pretences to piety they may at times be obliged to make, they are one and all irreligious sensualists, fatally wedded to the fleeting delights of the body. With appropriate slipperiness, these stock aspects of the favourite can all look like metaphors for one another, with the ...”

“... problem so much as a problem of life and representation. Make silly jokes about cancer and you may or may not get it at some point; describe it in a bald minimal way, a flouncy 1980s way or the would-be hard-biological way currently fashionable, as misfortune or genes or metaphor or punishment, and the result will be ...”

“... These days, it takes a Reader. I began by asking what book history is, but the harder question may be why anyone should care. From the outside, the discipline appears almost wilfully esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ...”

“... deliver the goods, disappeared a generation ago. The moral critique – the belief that capitalism may deliver the goods but does so inequitably – disappeared more recently, but it has disappeared. One effect has been to transform the Labour Party’s attitude to the private sector. For much of its history it regarded that sector as a burden the economy had ...”