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“... John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the chief reviewer of the Sunday Times, a BBC sage, a sought-after chairman of panels, a man well known for his strong opinions on all matters to do with literature and the other arts ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless ...”

“... nurses and auxiliaries, scanning his patient details, would cheerily address him as ‘John’.) He was already using the name that was to become so familiar, the byline that launched a thousand pieces. Was he already that ‘Frank Kermode’, that effortlessly elegant, perceptive, slyly amusing, wide-ranging critic? Not really, not to judge by ...”

“... of the socialist family though its practices were unsuited to Britain, was the only leader of a major social-democratic party associated with Moscow’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union. In practice, Communists, especially in the workplace, were seen not as rivals but as part of the labour community, even when Labour, anticipating the ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... footnotes, bibliographies. Malcolm Bradbury includes a ‘Select Bibliography’ and a ‘List of Major Works’. Frederick Karl offers up columns of elaborate notes. Marshall Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published ...”

“... of war in different ways during the 1940s (the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne),♪ while Walton churned out music for coercive films like Henry V and The First of the Few. In his Violin Concerto, Britten inaugurated an always changing, unpredictable, lifelong obsession with the form known as the passacaglia, in which variations ...”

“... crisis explicitly in this vein, following Maurice Cowling (The Impact of Hitler, 1975) and John Charmley (Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, 1989). Crowcroft presents himself as a disciple of Cowling and The End Is Nigh is a racier, more simplistic and more emotive version of Cowling’s book. Cowling was less hostile to the revisionists than to the ...”

“... and by the way: ‘AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner … which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in ...”

“... in many respects. They have failed taxpayers, who had to bail out a number of banks including some major institutions, with a cash outlay peaking at £133 billion, equivalent to more than £2000 for every person in the UK. They have failed many retail customers, with widespread product mis-selling. They have failed their own shareholders, by delivering poor ...”

“... renaissance, is also concerned with what might have been, and with a legend which has run from Sir John Holles to S.R. Gardiner. He shows Henry as heir to the aspirations of the Sidney circle, a patron of the arts, and a champion of the Protestant cause. Whether the English financial system would have permitted Henry as king to have championed the Protestant ...”

“... against the last two in individual cases. His stand against Communism brought about his first major success, and shows how patience is one of the qualities necessary in intelligence work. Knight had picked out and trained an agent, Olga Grey, in 1930, got her to become a Communist Party worker and ingratiate herself with one or two Soviet ...”

“... may be easy to write: good ones are much more difficult. This is especially true of the lives of major political figures. It is hard to strike the balance between public and private life; the day-today activities of politics and administration are often excruciatingly tedious; and past issues which once aroused passionate controversy can seem merely arcane ...”

“... they were after all withdrawal symptoms; by frustrating readers of their habitual fix – major happenings, well-marked characters, lots of scenery – she was alerting them to how deceitful she believed the conventions of the realist novel had become. By her abstractions she would be denying them the same illusory ‘solidity’ that is an object of ...”