“... neither could the king. This, of course, was a fiction. The king was well informed about what was said and done in the Commons, but he couldn’t be informed officially. This policy had kept more than one member out of prison during the reign of Charles I, and the Commons plea for freedom of speech, made at the beginning of each session by the speaker, was a ...”

“... of this early instance of self – mortification other than to note that a Jewish friend said of it: ‘That’s very Jewish.’ All one learns of Joseph’s marriage, which took place in 1951, is that his bride was an American and photogenic and that in 1978 a single-sentence statement recorded in the press that they had ‘decided to live ...”

“... You are going much too fast,’ Mrs Thatcher said on the News at One on Friday, 10 November, ‘first Poland, then Hungary, then – er, Czechoslovakia, now Eastern Germany ... ’. Heigh-ho, this was Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Czechoslovakia’ all over again, the far-away country of which we know little. The second half of the sentence was omitted from the television interview shown later that day ...”

“... misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a ...”

“... to an Elizabethan bishop, ‘if London were reformed, all the realm would soon follow.’ As was said of another metropolis and the cause of Catholic Counter-Reformation: ‘to purge Rome would be to purge the world.’ From this it follows that London and the Reformation contains at one and the same time an important account of national events, from a ...”

“... growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an obelisk, and said: ‘Why do they have a prick but no cunt? You have enough fucking feminists in this country – why don’t they protest? Why don’t they insist on erecting a cunt, in memory of – I don’t know – Annie Oakley, Marilyn Monroe, the witches of ...”

“... Chronicle, Melbourne, who was Prime Minister, wrote: ‘In this sort of matter there is much to be said upon both sides. A Minister has a great advantage in stating his own views to the public and if Palmerston in the Syrian affair had not as devoted an assistant as the Morning Chronicle, he would hardly have been able to maintain his course or carry through ...”

“... Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not ...”

“... This feeling of forever being somewhere in-between was Ford’s ongoing curse, or so he would have said. And of course the more he pondered it, the worse it got. The either/ors piled up, sometimes to breaking-point. Was he English or German? Pre-1914 he could take his pick, and did – but now, in wartime, a Hueffer could only be a spy. Another spur, this, to ...”

“... a kind of mutual respect. ‘Don’t touch the cloud-dweller,’ Stalin is supposed to have said about him, and the assumption is that the tyrant, who had a nose for such things, sensed that Pasternak was no threat to him but was admiring him in his own peculiar way. The poet Gumilov, Akhmatova’s husband, had actually taken part in an anti-Bolshevik ...”

“... I’d ever smelled coming from the kitchen. Ian screamed he was cooking kippers, I thought he said mutilating Flipper, and the girl from Glasgow mumbled something about breakfast and bit deeply into my flesh. This was my introduction to the UK and later 20th-century English literature. Ian wrote fiction for literary magazines, I wrote non-fiction for Time ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the Administration said, ‘If not now, when?’ and their opponents replied: ‘Why not later?’ The partisans of the Administration said there would be fewer body bags if Saddam was hit at once, and their opponents replied feebly that all body ...”

“... v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the pier-glass – with all my might.   As he slumped to the ground and fell backward, I saw I had kept my ...”

“... of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her life was uneventful – if one supposes that D’Annunzio and Hemingway (or Shelley and Byron) led the sort of lives writers should eventfully lead. But Stevie’s life (and I now fall, as Barbera/McBrien ...”