“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”

“... with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, was republished. Personality is important for a cult. The life must be close to the work, and almost but not quite a substitute for it, while the work itself is intimate with ...”

“... sit and write in perfect solitude.’ From Rome she headed to the Swiss Alps, where she envied the young men taking off for the high passes, and then back through Italy and Germany to Paris and London, before settling in for some months at the top of an old Venetian palace: A rather dark & very winding stairway, with mysterious doors & unexpected ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... new object, photographic, installation, trad fig. Since 1992 he’s been prominently showcasing young British artists, the objects of much attention and controversy lately. Surely some kind of indicative statement might have been expected. And this is what (ìn part) he said: ‘I’m not sure what today’s young artists ...”

“... of falsifying business records concerning funds channelled by Trump, via his former consigliere Michael Cohen, to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about sexual encounters with him. But evidence of the Trump Organisation’s dodgy finances has been accumulating for years. Indeed, in a different suit in civil court, filed by the New York ...”

“... preventable deaths. They are Antonio Bradley, Anibal Carrasquillo, Ricardo Cruciani, Albert Drye, Michael Lopez, Elijah Muhammed, Michael Nieves, Mary Yehudah and Tarz Youngblood. The name ‘Rikers Island’ conjures a monolithic structure, but there are ten correctional facilities on the island, seven of which are ...”

“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... in practice, and in any case an immense task of sorting, translating, and analysing lies ahead. Michael Howard, for instance, in a characteristically crisp introduction to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only ...”

“... called them, antagonised every influential social group: the military, writers and artists, young people, industrial workers, the bureaucrats in the ministries, the Party apparatus – and finally, his own colleagues in the Presidium. So ended a period of greater hope and change than the Soviet Union had known since the 1920s. When Khrushchev was ...”

“... On 10 September 1949 Michael Perrin, one of the heads of the British Atomic Energy Programme, was woken up by an urgent telephone call asking him to come to the communications room at the US Embassy in London. There his opposite number in the Pentagon asked that an RAF plane be sent to the upper atmosphere to check radioactivity detected by the US Air Force that appeared to signal a Soviet atomic explosion ...”

“... someone with the name Melania and Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. In October, the writer Michael Wolff filed suit against Melania Trump in New York, alleging that she had threatened him with a billion-dollar lawsuit over his reporting on her association with Epstein: ‘Mrs Trump’s claims are made for the purpose of ...”

“... if you don’t really want it, but Spender protested too much. In 1994 he wrote a letter to the young Alan Hollinghurst after receiving a copy of his second novel, The Folding Star. The letter shows a man in a state of confusion or unhappiness about the choices he has made. Dear Mr Hollinghurst Thank you very much for asking your publisher to send me ...”