“... which other (lesser?) authors have earned themselves vast fortunes and wide readerships. Palliser may think that he can write like Jeffrey Archer, for instance, and his portrayal of a self-important politician-turned-bestseller might have a degree of rough comic vigour, but when he makes a cursory attempt at Archer’s style – in which willing nymphets are ...”

“... hardly matters. The first version is to my mind the best, because the most ordinary. Since the man may survive or may not, which he does makes no difference to the story. (A modern narratology expert would shake his head at that.) The frostbite vs match sequence is more detailed and graphic in the first version, and two ...”

“... benign atmosphere. He also seems to have a predilection for works on a small scale, which may reflect the common tendency in collectors to favour things in their own image (as God does): Ortiz is a small, alert, dapper man. His taste can be hinted at, perhaps, by a guess at what he might like to have samples of if he collected European ...”

“... This leads us to consider a very important rhetorical figure (or ‘figure of thought’) which we may call the ‘self-excluder’. According to this figure, Sartre or Roland Barthes will heap obloquy on the ‘bourgeoisie’ while leaving quite unanswered the question of what ‘class’ they belong to themselves. The natural inference would be that they are ...”

“... that a large war was going on for much of the time, when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes to mind. The life of the House of Windsor in the days when it wasn’t ever ...”

“... attracted him. He was ‘as wild as the winds (or I should not have taken so to him)’. But he may have seen in Jack the unattainable ideal when he exclaimed after a more than usually rough night: ‘Drunken brutes. How was it that Jack was so different from the others?’ Yet perhaps John Sparrow was not altogether mocking Leeves. Some years ago he ...”

“... secret yearning, possibly, is to be the greatest marine biologist in the world. Nero and Commodus may even have lost their thrones and lives for the same reason: that their incompatible ambition was to be the greatest artist or the greatest chariot-driver. And something a bit similar gives its interest to the career of Katharine Hepburn, making this biography ...”

“... at the discovery of a governmental hypocrisy which determined his historic betrayal. In May 1878, Lord Salisbury and the Russian Ambassador in England, Count Schouvaloff, were busy concocting a treaty. Unhappily for Lord Salisbury, Marvin, already embittered over his employment, had a deep hostility to the ‘Russian Ex-Inquisitor’, as he called ...”

“... On the flat or over the sticks there is no quarter given in racing, none expected. Jockeys may be the best of friends in the weighing-room – though the most successful are often loners – but once under starter’s orders it is every man for himself. No room for the amateur, no room for any but the most hardened, mentally and ...”

“... was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing’. I liked the jape. Or at least, I liked maybe two-thirds of it. Because once you realised what Root was up to and how he made the joke work ...”

“... and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only ...”

“... except his own? The Weight of the world carries the s’enfoutiste ‘dedication’: To whom it may concern’. And of course the public loved it – or anyway they bought it. Even the critics loved it. Apparently there were only two dissenting opinions, and one of them, I guess, will have been in the FAZ.The Weight of the World is a journal kept by Handke ...”

“... Nothing could be further from the detective novel than this form of thriller-writing, and one may wonder why Ruth Rendell has moved from the comfortable world of Kingsmarkham where Wexford always gets his man to the lonely, desperate, mist-shrouded world of the Dollys, the Bawnes, the Mopsas and the Benets. Perhaps there is something logical in the ...”

“... is Huntford correct in his criticism of Scott’s methods – or, rather, non-methods – he also may well be correct in his speculations about the workings of Scott’s mind. Shackleton probably did haunt Scott as a competitor more than Amundsen, even though Shackleton was in England, Amundsen in the Antarctic, when the great race began. Scott had humiliated ...”

“... than accepting the Crown version in its untested form – will confront them. Wherever the truth may lie, it patently is less likely to lie in a version which reached the general public before it had been challenged and tested. The adversarial system does not reach truth, but it takes steps away from error. The logical weakness of the prosecution case stands ...”