“... Noël Coward never believed he had just a talent to amuse. A man who spent a lifetime merchandising his de-luxe persona, Coward liked to make a distinction between accomplishment and vanity: ‘I’m bursting with pride, which is why I have no vanity.’ A performer’s job is to be sensational; and in his songs, plays and public performances, Coward lived up to the responsibility of making a proper spectacle of himself ...”

“... There was a time when the only experts on matters related to nuclear fission were physicists. During the war, this expertise was extended to a highly selected corps of engineers. Nowadays, we need economists, industrial managers, medical specialists, military strategists and diplomatists to explain what is going on. There was a time when the whole affair was safely confined within the government apparatus of a few super-powers ...”

“... With Chomsky seemingly off the stage – exit left, the script reads, brooding on the sins of American foreign policy – it is now or never for Ferdinand de Saussure to take his place. One theorist of language at a time is probably all the popular awareness has room for, and over the past twenty years Chomsky has been it, investing grammar with a new, deep-seated charm, and bringing us to see language as a mysterious acquisition which does our species, and our brains, much credit ...”

“... Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF, or Latest Foreign Fraud. By this he meant any thinker from abroad (Paris, nine times out of ten) whose alembicated ideas were being taken up with more excitement than he thought they – or, I daresay, any ideas – were worth ...”

“... As English cricket’s first, and permanent, icon, W.G. Grace was a pair of inseparable initials – two doors down from that other High Victorian celebrity, ‘W.E.’ – and a ruling presence on the field of play, the muscular and assertive embodiment of the game in the years of its benign colonisation of the nation’s summers. The physique that famously sustained him was in truth a luxury: Grace was stronger than there was any call for a cricketer to be, ready to go off when young to run hurdle races between innings, and still up to bowling 75 overs in the match at the age of 50 (he was captain, and didn’t think of taking himself off ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits. But Arthur doesn’t take it lying down: no longer a sportsman but still a man ...”

“... What should a man famous for having wished the Author dead wish for himself once he becomes a dead author? To leave no trace behind would seem right. But if Roland Barthes was hostile to the neighbourly image of the Author as an extra-textual being, he took pleasure in the thought of himself returning as a biographical subject (i.e. object) once he was dead ...”

“... It is all but thirty-five years since Albert Camus was killed, when the Facel Vega sports car in which he was a passenger went off the road between Sens and Paris. Among his things was found Le Premier homme, the manuscript he had been working on for nearly a year at the time of the accident and on which there was still some way to go. Only now are we given it to read ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... Don Bradman did poorly by me in my youth: all I saw of him was his parting Oval duck in 1948, the most untimely nought in the history of cricket. It came on the first day of the fifth and last Test, with Australia three-nothing up, so whether our own side won or lost made small difference and we could watch the game as dilettantes instead of partisans, hoping that Bradman would bat, as he nearly always had, lavishly, or even brutally ...”

“... The only time L.P. Hartley met E.M. Forster they did not get on. Too much politeness, and mutual wariness. And what a comedy in contrasting physiques: Forster sharp, quizzical and birdlike; Hartley plump, vacant, moustached and apologetic, half walrus and half melting snowman, pipe in mouth. But underneath they had a great deal in common, and chiefly the mysterious, almost unconscious knowledge of their own powers as natural artists ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”

“... It’s often said that the short story today goes with poetry. But the trouble with bringing poetry in is not only that the ‘poetic’ is a bad thing in prose but that it implies a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential ...”

“... In Argentina in 1933, so Leslie Stainton tells us, Lorca ‘began wearing a white linen suit, and frequently a white cotton sailor’s shirt with a V-shaped neck and a dark sash. He took childlike delight in donning the shirt and going to the beach to “awaken” the seashells by calling out to them.’ He was obviously someone to be taken only in tiny doses ...”

“... Cape Y2K once safely rounded, and we shall be faced in short order by 2002, a date that stands suggestively out to the numerological eye as a palindrome. We’re allowed only one of these amphisbaenic years per century, though we lived through the last of them a bare eight-some ago, in 1991. Lived through it and failed for sure to spare it a glance ...”