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“... on the book after he finished law school, uncertain about his next steps. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel – who once answered a question about his interest in anti-ageing blood transfusions with the words ‘I am not a vampire’ – doesn’t appear in the book, though he’s listed in the acknowledgments. But Vance now says that hearing Thiel speak on ...”

“... sometimes eyeballing the camera, sometimes sweetly looking down:The author of the work you are now reading is a scared little shit. She’s frightened, forget what her life’s like, scared out of her wits, she doesn’t believe what she believes so she follows anyone. A dog. She doesn’t know a goddam thing she’s too scared to know what love is she has no ...”

“... sounded like – nothing much in fact, it was more the silence afterwards – as you sat in the reading room; and there is the more exact memory of the rest of that Friday night in the mad, panicking city, watching each parked car with a numb mixture of suspicion and disbelief, drinking in Toner’s pub until the early hours, the music on the radio, the ...”

“... Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which whammed him from every angle. (Styron, reading the galleys, goes down the checklist: ‘I’m a racist, a distorter of history, a defamer of black people, a traducer of the heroic image of “our” Nat Turner.’) Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, was a more calculated risk, the non-Jewish author ...”

“... cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in nonsense like Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, with all the while the bitter reality of the taxman, the press-gang, the whore, the rope, the dead child, the waste, the stolen apple. And all those books, about all those things. Madness. It’s a moot point as ...”

“... the real purpose of the UN Resolutions, then where does that leave our Modern Empiricists, our Peter Jenkinses and Hugo Youngs, our Edward Mortimers and Gerald Kaufmans and Paddy Ashdowns? Their ‘practical approach’, their faith in the ‘cock-up theory of history’, their insistence that political events must be judged as they come, each by ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... in which simple images have replaced ideas and argument has been supplanted by razzmataz. On this reading, Margaret Thatcher must rank as the premier who has hastened the reduction of the democratic process to the level of show-business. The writers’ tone is journalistic, and not always far removed from that of some of those whom they deride. However, their ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins with Rabelais and ends with Pasternak. It includes discussion of novels in ...”

“... contemptuous of the project even after the filming had started. Michael Gill and his co-producer, Peter Montagnon, have painful memories of a luncheon they and their team were given when they did some filming at Saltwood. Jane announced loudly that the Queen Mother had lunched there the week before and left a handsome tip for the servants, so the price of ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... in history to abide by his own teachings. Some 2500 years later, in 1975, the philosopher Peter Unger published a book called Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, in which, at the stupendous length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the ...”

“... frightened men, their obsession with the surface of femininity, and their lack of women.’ After reading this essay and (for example) the essay on Pollock, it wasn’t clear to me why it mattered, in terms of Berger’s notions of painting, whether a painting is thought to cling to the surfaces of things or to offer those surfaces as intimations of the ...”