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“... his predecessors. On 13 October 1983, less than a fortnight into his new job, he wrote a letter to Mr Derek Reeve, Kensington and Chelsea’s Deputy Director of Finance. The letter asked for help with a ‘difficulty’ Neil had with the residents’ parking scheme in Onslow Square, where he was living. Never one to underestimate the importance of high ...”

“... Iam​ an Arsenal fan. I’ve lived in New York for 25 years and still have my season ticket. I have an Arsenal tattoo. On the morning Arsène Wenger announced his retirement, my wife came into the kitchen and asked if I’d booked my flight yet ...”

“... be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... of his life’s work, inextricable from his larger concerns about history, culture and economics. Robert Casillo is therefore entirely correct to say that Pound’s writing raises ‘the problem of evil in literature’ in an especially clear way. ‘For it must be emphasised that Pound’s anti-semitism is quite different from Dostoyevsky’s and ...”

“... is up against variant forms from 1766 and 1776; that an injustice may have been done to Sir Robert Walpole (‘All those men have their price’); that ‘It is the first step which counts’ gets its power from the miracle that followed St Denis’s execution – ‘Afterwards he picked up his head and walked for six miles’; that nobody ever quite ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... All that seems clear is that it was someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish writers on politics might fulfil these requirements. The militia was attractive to upper-class society because of the opportunities it gave for the exertion of patronage, to the ...”

“... rehearsal – not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile’. The upheaval when at last it arrived was so violent, and for those who left the severance so abrupt, that coming home could never be a match for staying away. Inside Nabokov’s head the places he had known as a child had an enchanted ...”

“... connections between these works and subsequent debates over the development of New York – with Robert Moses’s highways, bridges and office towers pitched against Jane Jacobs’s street life and public characters – he is able to show that there is nothing epiphenomenal about urban cultural production. ‘There is a significant and surprisingly direct ...”

“... often with bibliographical exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole volume of reviews of ...”

“... that public, and Burk for the historians. For whom is Wrigley writing? He doesn’t quite say, but my sense is that he is writing ‘for the record’. Taylor was the sort of man to merit a ‘definitive’ biography, and while one might say Burk’s study met that need, its thematic structure and dense historiographical focus made it an unconventional ...”

“... with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me’. He was very serious, but could be very funny too. He taught at MIT for a year but decided he was a poor teacher, inclined to drift. So he applied to a programme at the school newly opened in Los Angeles by the American Film Institute to improve the minds ...”