“... of a donnish party. It is even with a sense of wonder, rather than complete horror, that we read of his frankly appalling fantasies of mass murder: the dream of sitting on the rooftops, neatly unhooking the sharp-edged slates and aiming them at the necks of anonymous passers-by ‘until the air was full of their silly heads, flying around as thick as ...”

“... the Brezhnev regime were becoming too flagrant to be ignored. The Soviet top brass were forced to read the offending document and digest its message. The death of Brezhnev saved her and her colleagues from further harassment. The new Secretary for Agriculture, brought into the Politburo by Andropov, was Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she had met in 1982 as a member ...”

“... there was talk of too much King’s Road booze, too much of the old showbiz. You could not read about Chelsea in those days without getting a list of their ‘growing array of support from the entertainment world, including Terence Stamp, Michael Crawford, David Hemmings, Lance Percival, Tommy Steele and Marty Feldman’ – and that was just the ...”

“... the next red-hot piece of dietic advice is likely to be eat lots of everything. Remember where you read it first. From the lay point of view, much of this seems a pretty laboured way of making common-sensical observations: use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, and don’t eat too much of any one thing. The puzzling and irritating thing about these fads ...”

“... book and expecting it to live up to its title might well be disappointed if he had not also read Lucas and Koss. The presence of Koss’s monumental volume may have led Miss Brown to compress her own volume into smaller compass than she might otherwise have allowed, for Koss himself thanked her in his introduction. In a curious way, however, the books ...”

“... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...”

“... I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection ...”

“... in later years sometimes as few as two or three canvases. He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting ...”

“... Things to read when you’re between boyfriends and being on your own is making you miserable: The Trials of Claus von Bülow, When Husbands Come Out of the Closet, Romola, Hard Times. Wendy Moore’s history of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, might not have been written to make lonelyhearts feel better, but its purpose would otherwise be obscure ...”

“... abandoned on a train by an aristocrat who, having bagged the manuscript, doesn’t even bother to read it.‘The Death of the Lion’ is characterised by swipes at avaricious magazine editors, gender-fluid and novelty-hungry authors, and an aspirational literary set. James’s aversion to such people spilled over into his response to the society with which ...”

“... was newly out of convent school, where she had received an unusually enlightened education and read widely. When she encountered Lord Byron at a conversazione in Venice in April 1819, she was feeling trapped in her marriage and open to ways out.Byron had lived in Venice since 1816, the year of his departure from England. Even for him it had been a ...”

“... Lavers as ‘his only novel, and a love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged ...”

“... immoraliste, E.T.A. (Amadeus) Hoffmann, Byron, Kierkegaard (the aesthetic v. the ethical) and Richard Strauss, to Shaw and Eric Linklater. The sociological aspects of the ever-interesting topic are not neglected. Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of ...”

“... in France, and elsewhere, are always talking of the death of the novel. Cobb ignores this. He has read Henri Béraud, Maxence Van der Meersch, Eugène Dabit, and many other minor masters of the French récit who though often forgotten are nevertheless excellent witnesses, even in Paris, to a provincial life that refuses to die. My compatriots have long ...”

“... countries, they have been especially active from the 18th-century Bishop Lowth in England, Richard Grant White in the America of a century later, to Fowler and his successors in our own time. Many of them found they were ‘doing well by doing good’, as Tom Lehrer puts it in another connection, and the popular profitability of Emily Post linguistics ...”