“... on Fifth Avenue; he now lives in a townhouse on East 92nd Street. He plays jazz clarinet at Michael’s Pub, and rarely misses a game of the New York Knicks. Marion Meade’s new biography is judicious and independent-minded on all the important issues, even-handed without being bland. She hasn’t spoken to Allen – or he hasn’t spoken to her ...”

“... in the face of widespread criticism of his handling of the crisis in Chechnya. Blair would be wise to call in these debts, to remind Clinton of the enormous efforts that previous American Presidents made to construct and maintain the current arms control regime. He should seek to convince the President that the lack of a foreign policy legacy is a price ...”

“... If you took​ only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”

“... exposed as a social impostor – his daughter went to the sister school of the one attended by Michael Portillo – were as much about class as they were about race. It’s a pity, therefore, that the unifying ‘we’ with which the authors underscore their book prevents the potentially divisive issue of class from being fully explored. How much does an ...”

“... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...”

“... a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’ And there is Milos Hrma, the young, timid railway signalman in Hrabal’s most famous novel, Closely Observed Trains. When he ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... plays when old, essays and memoirs of various stripes all along. By turns, polemical, mild, droll, wise, ironic. (None of these, I think, have appeared in English, which, true to form, is interested only in echt novel novels. Danish novels.) He summarises himself – early, but it remained true: ‘I have pursued writing since my childhood and have had only ...”

“... such trove? I decided, using a polite intermediary, to inflict it on Mr Laurence himself. But he, wise man, refused to be encumbered with such help. In his introduction to this bibliography Mr Laurence likens himself to Childe Roland who ‘to the dark tower came’. It is difficult to know precisely what to make of this. Are we to deduce that, like Edgar, he ...”

“... more demotically awkward, more (the word presented itself) Wordsworthian. Perhaps I’m being wise after the event: at any rate the event –this collection of nine demanding and tough-minded essays –bears me out. Wordsworth is its presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and ...”

“... most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state. The concept of civil ...”

“... assertion of the British national interest since the Second World War and an excellent example of wise state intervention’ – would gain general assent except in the case of the section preoccupied (as he is not) with the hazards of nuclear power. He talks of integrated transport and energy policies as though he means it. He can see the argument for some ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... irresistible, when everything essential to that theatre actually lies beyond archaeology. As Michael Hattaway reminds us in his eloquent new study of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, the Globe and the rest did not define the drama that they housed. Far more important than the ‘wooden O’ and ‘cockpit’ were those shared attitudes ...”

“... weren’t a young man’s poems, they weren’t even new poems, they were old poems: generalising, wise, consensual, to coin a word, veritudinous. In one of the Bollingen volumes, the indulgent and intellectualist Broch wrote in that mid-century Eliotic way of the poems’ ‘suppression of self’. Indeed, their experiential component was close to zero: they ...”