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“... body, ‘the essence of personhood’. The normal word for ‘beautiful’, kalos, also means ‘noble and good’ – think of all those cards at Kensington Palace describing Diana as ‘a beautiful person’ and you are getting close to the confusion of categories. The normal word for ‘ugly’, aischros, also means ‘shameful and mean’ – think of ...”

“... in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ...”

“... delay ferment memory and old jottings with an element of invention – or at least imagination. As Andrew O’Hagan wrote (in the LRB of 25 September 2008), ‘his fictional powers only reached full flourish when he wasn’t writing novels.’ Take Naples ’44, which many readers (including me) think was his masterpiece. An account of his service as an ...”

“... Parker-Bowles, it is as easy to understand why the Princess encouraged her friends to talk to Andrew Morton as it is to understand that the Prince was horrified and humiliated when Diana: Her True Story appeared. For someone as lonely, insecure and unhappy as Charles, it proved impossible to maintain a dignified silence, and the temptation to reply has ...”

“... Cook and Banks came in their turn to observe the celestial Venus, and to discover a new kind of noble savage, the nubile savage, revealed to English readers in Hawkesworth’s florid but basically faithful rendition of their journals. To these readers, shocked or delighted by the ‘spectacle’ of public copulation in Tahiti which Hawkesworth made public ...”

“... stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and snarling lions); ‘If Nancy Was the Bright’s Disease’ (an alarmed Nancy grimacing inside a diseased kidney taken from a medical journal); ‘If Nancy Was André Breton at 18 Months’ (her head imposed ...”

“... it. The prose, which started out quite dry and comic, starts clogging with archaic words and faux-noble cadences; ‘noisome’, ‘fell’, ‘fair and foul’, ‘wains’ and ‘wights’ and ‘wroth’. ‘Well, bless my beard!’ That’s Gandalf in Chapter 2 of Volume I. ‘Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... through those counterculture years. Watson’s early chapters are beta rhythm blasts, pitching the noble Zappa against the entropy of sunrise capitalism’s spectacle obsessed fetishism. Bad shopping plus bad sex equals great poetry. (Who else but Zappa would rhyme ‘afternoon’ with ‘tampoon’?) The in-your-face critique, originally rehearsed through ...”

“... business. His sisters were no ordinary country girls. The family’s guardian and relative Andrew Cusack, a draper in the town, arranged for them to be sent as boarders up to Dublin to be educated in Padraig Pearse’s experimental school, St Ita’s. This was an extraordinary decision for any family in Ireland at that time, even more so for one from ...”

“... to Scots in the British Empire. Julius Victor, in The Three Hostages (1924), is an unequivocally noble character, though Buchan spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at ...”

“... full of melancholy empathy for an irrecoverable past, Communism is seen as ‘a doomed, flawed but noble faith’. But Samuel did not write his now reissued book until the 1980s, and then as an unhappy commentary on the disintegration of the Party he had left behind thirty years earlier. In fact, the disintegration of the movement has made possible the current ...”

“... list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit ...”

“... to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am, Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I ...”

“... out that it was Lewis Theobald who first decided that in Act II Scene iii of Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek has sent sixpence to Feste for his ‘leman’, rather than, as the Folios have it, for his ‘lemon’. (‘But the Clown was neither Pantler, nor Butler,’ Theobald crowed. ‘The Poet’s Word was certainly mistaken by the Ignorance of the ...”