“... have demanded six uninterrupted months from a mere mortal. Edwardes wrote it while running BL: it took ‘every spare moment for 16 weeks’. It is a commonplace that the Winter of Discontent lost Labour the 1979 Election, but in the manufacturing industries the rot had set in far earlier, and the chaos at Leyland symbolised it. I remember waves of laughter ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... boy!’ he would say to his mother, pointing to a photograph of himself. At the age of nine, he took the photograph down and scratched crosses over the face. He, too, turned to petty crime and was sent to reform school. This proved to be a redemptive experience and when he returned to New York he took up boxing, under the ...”

“... Opposite the title-page of Mr Baker’s skeletonised but substantially accurate account of John Anderson’s philosophy there stand two epigraphs. They are both from Heraclitus or, more precisely, from Burnet’s translation of that enigmatic philosopher. The first of them is ontological: ‘The world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and measures going out ...”

“... He then embarked on a ten-year stint in the Armed Forces, which was largely unprofitable but which took him to the Middle East, an experience that profoundly affected the development of his idiosyncratic view of world history. As an RAF clerk Corporal Mitchell learned methodical writing habits that stood him in good stead when, on discharge in 1929, he became ...”

“... rumour could get about that Radicalism was really nothing more than a misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was the quintessential English Radical. With few teeth, a pronounced lisp and ...”

“... bar and there he was, the Old Man, larger than life, his eye like a raptor’s, raw and quick, who took Bacon that day in Spain, who took Soutine and Schiele and Rouault, three who knocked me flat before I could think, before I knew a thing, leaving me no way back, and took John Keats ...”

“... resounding victory at Towton in Yorkshire, fought that same year in a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In ...”

“... they were accessible to all who could pay the price of admission. One of the leading characters in John Brewer’s The Pleasure of the Imagination was a visitor to pleasure gardens. Anna Margaretta Larpent was a moderately prosperous lady living in London in the late 18th century, married to the state official responsible for vetting plays before they reached ...”

“... smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their ...”

“... achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is ...”

“... connections I had sensed with ‘class’ and ‘art’, with ‘industry’ and ‘democracy’, took on, in the language, not only an intellectual but a historical shape. I see those changes today [1976] in much more complex ways. ‘Culture’ itself has now a different though related history. But this was the moment at which an inquiry which had begun ...”

“... of animosities, already a game promising considerable refinement. It offered those gentlemen who took the field an opportunity to be suitably paternalistic without their also having to feel they were slumming. Hence the odd cricketing duke like Dorset, or the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood before him. And hence royalty even, because one of the game’s first ...”

“... espionage worlds, and subsequently in business journalism. Unlike Fleming’s previous biographer John Pearson, Donald McCormick makes no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ...”

“... of the condition by American novelists are surprisingly rare. One of the most vivid comes from John Updike’s Bech is back, the second of his books to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards ...”