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“... have replied: ‘My dear – the noise, and the people.’ As good an impression as any that could be devised from (in his case) normal social experience. The fragment of Beowulf known as ‘The Finnsburgh Episode’ provides a standard formula for expressing the shock-horror impact of a surprise attack on a heroic society. The Battle of Maldon is justly ...”

“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May ...”

“... Since when the period of neglect ‘has grown shorter each year so that it now seems to be something like a minute. It is no longer possible, or it seems no longer possible, for an important avant-garde artist to go unrecognised.’ Ashbery’s sense of historical change is too tidy, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of his claim: the ...”

“... 2000, was the result of decades of hard-fought campaigning, inside and outside Parliament. By the time he became leader in 1994, Labour had long been committed to enacting legislation that would allow anyone to request information held by public bodies. But far from embracing FOI in office, Blair dragged his ...”

“... representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that ‘what follows is tragedy. – Or, at least, the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it’s said.– A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times.’ The Lost Father recounts a ...”

“... this is only the beginning of a list. He is saturated in the literary past but unhindered by it, able to adapt a 19th-century manner to subjects the past could not accommodate; he’s hardly unaware of the siren voices of modernism but remains safely tied to the mast. It’s likely that Hollinghurst has encouraged more aspiring novelists than anyone ...”

“... a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life. But James Merrill: Life and Art shows that you should be careful what you wish for. At 809 pages, not including a hundred ...”

“... Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty is a rich old subject, and can be approached from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he writes, ‘I began to wonder who the Tennants were. Should I ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... Norman Tebbit, Conservative Party Chairman, was displeased by television coverage of the American attack on Libya. British public opinion had swung so decisively against the raid, he said, because of the pictures people had seen on their television sets. Not pictures of bombed-out military installations, which would have been all right, but pictures of dead and wounded civilians ...”

“... out of the way. If one’s view is that Neil Kinnock is a good man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s ...”

“... against the customer while pretending to do the reverse. For an industry which is supposed to be alert and quick on its feet, the press took a long time to appreciate the advantages of having a watchdog of its own with india-rubber teeth. A General Council of the Press was recommended in 1949 by the first postwar Royal ...”

“... Rule for Ireland and of any showdown between the British Government and the Ulster Unionists, but by the end of the war the popular mood in Ireland, stirred by trauma of Easter Week 1916, was overwhelmingly in favour of some form of independence: Sinn Fein won 73 of 105 seats in the General Election of 1918, the last held ...”