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“... and her perhaps, at face value. They learned that although she was shy she was not timid. When Colin Haycraft seemed to want to drop her from Duckworth’s list she duly left. Then, when he seemed to regret it and want her to stay, she stood firm with a reply so delicately two-edged that it was lacerating whichever way he took it: ‘I don’t at all ...”

“... Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No ...”

“... deficiencies. A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch ...”

“... is that we keep likening his writing to a drug. ‘I need the next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is ...”

“... books, writings that are now being tidied up, edited and steadily published (see for instance Colin Kidd’s review of two such posthumous volumes in the LRB of 22 May 2008). Sisman’s biography gives evidence that he felt this as a failure himself. Even Mrs Thatcher scolded him for weak book productivity. ‘On the stocks? On the stocks? A fat lot of ...”

“... aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather lesser era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 pages, with a disgruntled ...”

“... was sent a bomb in a hollowed-out book called Ice Brothers; another of his victims, Edward John Smith, had the same name as the captain of the Titanic. Kaczynski believed that the ship of modern technology was heading for an iceberg. Foster thinks that a close study of this evidence might have helped the authorities home in on Kaczynski earlier than they ...”

“... but I’d caught up with ska. I liked Burroughs, Kerouac, Borges, Kafka and Orwell. I’d read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I’d read Camus, in translation. I wore Dr Martens boots. At home I secretly drank my mum and dad’s Martini and in the pub I pretended to like beer. I watched a lot of TV. I liked chips, sausages and my mum’s roast dinners. I ...”

“... the careful distinctions Forbes is offering. ‘I’m a servant of democracy,’ she told STV’s Colin Mackay. ‘I’m not sitting here as a dictator saying that I will absolutely impose my views.’ But precedent suggests that wherever evangelicals hold power their beliefs do inform their policies. That’s the point. You can see it in Republican states in ...”

“... a play might be unique seemed to them very strange indeed. 27 June, Chichester. Talking to Maggie Smith about the number of grey heads in our audience, I compare them with a field of dandelion clocks. She says that she’s read or been told that the Warwickshire folk name for these was ‘chimney-sweeps’ so that Shakespeare’s ‘Golden lads and girls all ...”

“... familiar truths of national character. The dictionary had been undertaken by the publisher George Smith as a piece of private enterprise, with no official or institutional backing, and it had been brought to completion in record time by a very small staff. Less fortunate nations, in whom the spirit of liberty and energy of ‘character’ had been suppressed ...”

“... T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the ...”

“... stressed that Parshley should not be seen as the villain of the piece. A professor of zoology at Smith College, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Beauvoir’s book. It was the publisher, not Parshley, who insisted on cutting the text; in the end he cut 145 of the original 972 pages, or almost 15 per cent of the original. The strength of Parshley’s ...”

“... much else of worth.’ He was perfectly aware of his reputation as a cantankerous grump: when Colin Burrow reviewed his collected poems in the LRB (20 February 2014), the piece was entitled ‘Rancorous Old Sod’, which actually mitigated a harsher self-description (‘rancorous, narcissistic old sod’). He is splendidly vituperative in this poem about ...”