“... flashy reversing, zooming and stopping as the rear cars begin to turn round. In the course of this James R. goes over to one of the cars and asks them if they are looking for the man with a hammer, whereupon a policeman leaps from the car, and ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall, shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’ and the young man ...”

“... in the book to have consistently informed on him to his rivals, the eccentric and disastrous Gerald Long, and above all his successor Charles Douglas-Home, who is presented by Harry Evans as a schemer, double-dealer and back-stabber worthy of – well, not of Shakespeare or Renaissance Italy, where disloyalty had some sinister splendour, but perhaps of ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”

“... explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the non-specialist ...”

“... have opted for third-person narration, fertile territory for Jamesian negotiations of perspective (James being the writer whose effects he most admires). A stronger sense of a social web, and of the claims of belonging, has been evident, particularly in The Spell (1998), where domestic intimacy as well as pleasure-seeking was part of what the characters wanted ...”

“... of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our best ...”

“... on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his supersubtlety, not ...”

“... a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis was on the novelist’s homosexuality. Chatto’s handout spoke delicately of ‘her highly significant friendship ...”

“... all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and patronage ...”

“... for her writing than the pressures exerted on young Daphne by her amorous, possessive father Gerald – who played Captain Hook/Mr Darling on the stage and passed on a dire Peter-Panishness to her – were the now forgotten bestsellers of a man who spoke to the anxieties of the 1890s. Peter Ibbetson (1891) was an earlier Peter Pan, the fantasy of a ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover that McCord was the security co-ordinator for the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, known by its acronym – at once sinister and hapless – CREEP. The ...”

“... She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or have worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called ...”

“... in his sleep.’ The Rover has indeed something of that verbal satisfaction which attended Henry James’s style, and grew on it and with it to the point where idea and intention became superfluous. ‘I’m never sure what it is I’m affirming,’ Conrad said despondently at this late time to a young French writer: but ‘affirmation’, in the sense that ...”

“... it ‘rather dreary’. The following year, when Another Country appeared, he made his position on James Baldwin clear: ‘I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going ...”