“... unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit ...”

“... and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places ...”

“... and Kim Jong-un – but, however atypical Snowden was in other ways, this timing was crucial. A little older and he wouldn’t have encountered the internet until adulthood; a little younger and the internet he found would have been the corporate version we have now. His family got its first modem in 1992, when ...”

“... among these a few should nonetheless be works of distinction. Stoner, a book that received very little notice upon its appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English ...”

“... or offering any medical assistance to the wounded – for fear, he said, that his little force might be ambushed. This was extremely unlikely. The crowd of fifteen thousand or more that had gathered on 13 April 1919 was unarmed and peaceable, some of them listening to speeches, others simply milling about and chatting, many of them having come ...”

“... Nixon – from making a catastrophic decision? (‘That raised the hair on the back of my neck, a little bit,’ Hering remembered in an interview with Radiolab earlier this year.) His instructor requested that he put his question in writing. ‘There’s presently a degree of doubt in my mind as to whether I might one day be called upon to launch nuclear ...”

“... hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole. When the saint points out this can’t be done, the child – who reveals himself to be Jesus – ribs him, saying that he, Augustine, is trying ...”

“... when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are nourishing to the spirit. Livy, Machiavelli, Ford, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson all figure in the book, but the main recurring subject is Shakespeare. It is, moreover, good to see the publication ...”

“... a tang of truth but not too much overt significance. The name Moyra Grabham he thought had ‘a little too much meaning’ to be used in The Ivory Tower. Even James had his Archers and his Goodwoods early in his career, though, and listed ‘Remnant’ and ‘Masterman’ in his notebooks as potentially useful names when he found them in the Times. Jane ...”

“... Asher Silberman issued a stinging rebuttal of the minimalist stance in 2006. David may have been little more than a hilltop chieftain, but contrary to the minimalists, the discovery in 1993 of a ninth-century BCE Aramaic victory inscription referring to a royal ‘House of David’ leaves little doubt that he was a real ...”

“... is a mass of detail about the couple’s wardrobes, both fashionable and functional: I like the little twist about Margherita’s favourite pair of gloves, ‘double kid bordered with gold thread’, and how she probably gave up wearing them after 1388, when a new Florentine law decreed that prostitutes had to wear gloves. Another favourite topic is ...”

“... famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers, it ventriloquises Barthes’s late style of ‘biographical ...”

“... vignettes of poverty, endless movement around the same small nexus of streets, the Village, Little Italy. He was ‘God’s spy’, a poet fink keeping secret notebooks. The early poems are about his mother and the sea, their correspondence: ‘The sea ate her / Upon the shore I found a strange / yet beautiful food.’ Or about gangsters, death ...”

“... their father’s permission was needed and he was reluctant to give it. In her diary Vera ascribed Arthur Brittain’s opposition to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I ...”

“... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”