“... silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure’, if we may borrow a phrase from another arch-formalist, Stephen Dedalus. Such a view ignores the special status of feminine beauty in Western culture. There is no intrinsic reason why woman, naked or clothed, should be the supreme aesthetic subject of art: she has held that place because an appropriative male desire ...”

“... Office’s Information and Research Department. Kingsley Martin: Decayed liberal. Very dishonest; Stephen Spender: Sentimental Sympathiser and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all of ...”

“... Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, until recently colleagues at Time magazine, are relatively young men, educated (at Harvard) in the late Sixties and early Seventies during the heyday of revisionism, and more likely than Hugh Thomas, one would suppose, to have been influenced by its arguments. But while their book is not, certainly, unaffected by ...”

“... English culture. The MacDiarmid who began to write in Scots had found himself in the position of Stephen Dedalus, who thinks about the English Jesuit dean: ‘My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’ Modernism gains its characteristic effects by wide cultural comparisons frequently involving a language that draws on materials from beyond the ...”

“... his sister, Mischa, was killed and eaten by Nazi troops who had previously done the same to a young deer – hence Dr Lecter’s anti-deer-hunter thing; hence also his cannibalism. All this humanises Lecter. We find out about the primal scene in his psychological formation (the one in which Mischa is killed and eaten, and he then finds her teeth in the ...”

“... from his beloved Admiralty. Tomalin’s Pepys is a more domestic man than the coarse careerist of Stephen Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... metaphor of pharmacological magic, of revitalising the self through its energy. Hélène Smith, a young Genevan medium who starred in Dr Théodore Flournoy’s bestseller From India to the Planet Mars (1899),4 spoke in many tongues, including Martian. Her multiple selves included Marie Antoinette, a 15th-century Hindu princess called Simandini, and a ...”

“... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...”

“... which was both male and female, consisted of dozens of national groups, ranged from the very young to the quite old, and fought on many fronts. What can we learn about such an army from the several dozen memoirs and diaries, the letters and the interview notes the author has in her possession? A great deal. The most urgent and interesting questions about ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...”

“... as we speak. This kind of sententious assurance comes easily to him, it always has, even from a young age his sense of spiritual authority was insufferable.’ Isn’t it the adjective that is insufferable? There’s no one inside the book to pronounce such a verdict, and any number of slyer, more smoothly flowing alternatives could have been used.Galgut ...”

“... journal Our Time, and Geoffrey Matthews, later a Shelley scholar. When they tried to join the Young Communist League their letters were intercepted and the police summoned to interview them in the head’s study. The Thompsons’ neighbours in Boars Hill, the Carritts, had seven children and when one of the daughters died, the five brothers and their ...”

“... read to him from birth; but they only really sounded like Thomas. And, unusually for an ambitious young poet of the time, Thomas was not trying too hard to be original: there just seemed to be something he could do with words that no one else could do. He was, in that sense, tailor-made for the romantic myth of the poet as self-fashioned ...”