“... Malone. He was initially a sceptic: he thought Theobald had tricked up an old play, perhaps by Philip Massinger, with Shakespearean touches. His own copy of Double Falsehood survives, tartly annotated, especially where he found genuine echoes of Shakespeare: he thought the line ‘Throw all my gay comparisons aside’ (clearly parallel to ‘lay his gay ...”

“... slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style ...”

“... accounts of recordings made by Eliot, of stage and radio adaptations made by others – oh, in short, the lot! It is a phenomenal achievement; and although reading it cover to cover can feel like being stuck in some brilliantly devious Borges story, it surely sets standards that few succeeding editors of the complete works of poets of the last century are ...”

“... and did so with such ruthlessness that one friend suggested the book should be subtitled ‘A Short Cut to Unpopularity’. The prose of Eliot (with whom Graves was supposed to have collaborated on the study of modernist poetry he eventually wrote with Riding) is given a chilly slap: it ‘seems to shrink from the responsibility of “bestowing ...”

“... it off-putting.One of the extras asks me what I am reading. I show him my book, some Alice Munro short stories, whereupon he says, ‘I’m reading this,’ and takes out a paperback of My Secret Life, the saga of the sexual adventures of a middle-class gentleman in Victorian London. It’s a book with more sex per page than almost any other, and not a book ...”

“... Games. The Chinese woman walks, right shoulder to the fence, in a clockwise direction; her husband short-strides with less urgency the other way. And when they meet they do not acknowledge one another, not so much as a nod or a smile. My impression is that he is less enthusiastic about the regime. He wears a monkish hooded top and looks like a sixty-a-day man ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... need for a Big idea. On her first official visit to Harrow after their marriage, she delivered a short speech to Mosley’s constituents thanking them for their wedding present. ‘Saying just the right thing in the right way,’ the Constituency President wrote to her husband, ‘she gripped ... the heart of her audience at once.’ Mosley was interested in ...”

“... relationship.’ The whole experience brought home to Virginia a difficult truth. She wrote to Philip Morrell: One cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and spell-bound? The greater openness with her ...”

“... a keen sense of vulnerability. ‘We are fighting an election every day of the week,’ Prince Philip once said of the British royal family. Akihito’s efforts were many times more energetic and consistent, even though Japan doesn’t have a republican movement, and alternatives to the monarchy are almost never debated in the mass media. ‘Ten per cent ...”

“... claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks ...”

“... critics – which animates not literary theory in general but the reigning usurpers. It is then a short step to the abolition of much else. Hartman speaks with level derangement of the ‘illusion that genius exists.’ No, he doesn’t mean the illusion that there are geniuses around now, he means what he blankly says: the illusion that there is such a thing ...”

“... semi-abstract, reflecting the music within. In the green-washed photo on the back, Eno has notably short hair and is reading a book. Not something you’d see on the covers of many rock albums of the time. Another Green World is the opposite of prog, although it features various prog-adjacent musicians, whose contributions Eno applies like dabs of ...”

“... of privilege.’ We have heard this credo from Cisneros, and we hear it, via McGurl, from Philip Roth:It ‘did not dawn on’ [Roth] that the ‘anecdotes and observations’ of his boyhood in lower-middle-class Newark with which he entertained his highbrow friends ‘might be made into literature’. Instead, the ‘stories I wrote, set absolutely ...”

“... its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free debate. Others again want the exposure and don’t care about the IoI’s ...”