“... older sister Rita. Rita Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic ...”

“... Atlas discusses a scene in ‘Something to Remember Me By’, one of Bellow’s most affecting short stories. While Bellow does share with the character some similarities in family background, this hardly allows a supposition that Louie, in confessing to his son, is revealing the circumstances of Bellow’s supposed failure to mourn. Atlas ...”

“... Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to Matthew Arnold in Westminster Abbey was cut short by a letter from the Dean informing him that there already was one, ‘I am still sure that there is a point to be made, even if I am no longer quite so sure what it is.’ Besides, there is now, whatever negative view one takes of Murdoch, one huge thing ...”

“... a cameo on The Simpsons.Despite his astonishing range (poems, prefaces, novels, collections of short stories, essays and reviews, the play Buchanan Dying, a gathering of golfing meditations, art criticism for museum-goers – museums for him doubling as erotic temples), Updike foresaw that he might become a victim of typecasting, tagged as an exhibit. In a ...”

“... As I was starting to write this I came across a poem by Philip Larkin, the last part of which reads: And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”

“... began to think about Judith Hearne when he was 27, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been ...”

“... of society. Kynaston, discussing ‘City cultural supremacy’, says that ‘in all sorts of ways (short-term performance, shareholder value, league tables) and in all sorts of areas (education, the NHS and the BBC, to name but three), bottom-line City imperatives had been transplanted wholesale into British society.’ This uncritical and uninformed ...”

“... opportunities for amplification and further collections in the years to come.’ In 1999, when Philip Horne edited Henry James: A Life in Letters, which remains the best single selection of James’s letters – the greatest hits, all 296 of them, superbly annotated and put in context – he pointed out that half of the letters he had included had not been ...”

“... which are often drowned out or made unintelligible by the sounds of the road or the subway.In the short film Lettre de cinéaste (1984), commissioned for television by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Akerman, lying in bed, speaks directly to the camera: ‘If I make films, it’s because I didn’t dare take up the challenge of writing.’ Was this ...”

“... business, who had been living and prospering in London since the early 1580s – someone, in short, very like Christopher Mountjoy. They must certainly have known one another. How much they liked one another can perhaps be gauged from events at the magistrates’ court, where Bowin’s ‘information’ about the three Frenchmen led to embarrassing ...”

“... The Excellency of a Free State of 1656 sums up both Machiavelli’s notoriety and his place in the short-lived English republic: ‘It was a noble saying, (though Machiavel’s), “Not he that placeth a virtuous government in his own hands, or family; but he that establisheth a free and lasting form, for the people’s constant security, is most to be ...”

“... among university lecturers; some of them, like his colleague in the University of Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon (‘Black-Earth’, from his original surname, Schwarzerdt), kept this name for the rest of their lives. In Dr Luther’s case, though, the new surname was also a devout play on words, reflecting a sense of the liberation which came from his ...”

“... to Petrarchan scholars, and Christopher Celenza tucks into them with quiet determination in his short life-and-works overview, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. The subtitle is taken from one of Petrarch’s verse letters, where he describes himself as ‘peregrinus ubique’ (more precisely translated as ‘everywhere a pilgrim’). He was indeed a restless ...”

“... Couzens’s conviction for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a police commissioner, Philip Allott, resigned after giving a radio interview suggesting that Everard should not have ‘submitted’ to arrest by her killer, who was, at the time, a serving police officer.Newton also cross-examined Harvey about her ‘sweetheart’ in Wellington; she ...”