“... was first intellectual. When at Yale Law School, a place of empty ambition and groupthink, he saw Peter Thiel speak. Thiel was ‘possibly the smartest person I’d ever met’, and openly Christian, confounding his prejudice that ‘Christians are rubes.’ He found in René Girard, Thiel’s favourite thinker, a convincing explanation for the hollowness of ...”

“... explicitly gay love poems. It is easy to imagine F.O. Matthiessen and his lover Russell Cheney reading it in the Twenties. Since they had no role models and no sense of being part of any tradition it was the sort of work which was important for them. Matthiessen wrote: ‘Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us knows a parallel ...”

“... and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays such as Sarah Kofman’s on Kant and respect for women, it contains a representative deconstruction by Derrida of the philosophical notion of ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... in archives and indexed and endlessly examined. His works were meticulously edited by the late Peter Davison. This creates a big problem for his biographers. There’s just too much life. No biographer wants to be the one who fails to mention, say, that Orwell in Spain, ‘having passed the train journey up from the front gorging himself on ...”

“... Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from work, Ben’s outspoken and eccentric personality is news to me, with both his sons saying how lucky they felt ...”

“... more by the designer on his first visit in July 1957 (he had pictured the site by knowledgeably reading marine charts). ‘He’s our Gary Cooper!’ a Sydney matron gushed on sighting the tall, blond, blue-eyed Dane and hearing his exotic, Norse-tinged English, a change from the somewhat harsh local accent. Although his idea was little more than a ...”

“... frightening pallor and unfathomable occupation, to be exactly real. He was Mr McGregor from the Peter Rabbit tales, or one of those old men in Edward Ardizzone books who shake their skinny fists at naughty children and weakly yell ‘Confound you!’ A world in which adults didn’t much credit the reality of children could work the other way round, too.At ...”

“... The Olivier chapters in Carey’s novel are cleverly and consistently crafted, but I found while reading them that I was mentally turning the pages, impatient to get back to Parrot. Parrot and Olivier in America is much preoccupied with the subject of freedom. Prisons and imprisonment crop up all over the novel and inform its imagery. The question of what it ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of ...”

“... 28 January 2005. Fly to Rome for a British Council reading. It occurs to me that a lot of the camp has gone out of British Airways and that as the stewards have got older and less outrageous so the service has declined. This morning there is scarcely a smile, not to mention a joke, the whole flight smooth, crowded and utterly anonymous ...”

“... Sagar’s magnum opus, Literature and the Crime against Nature, heavily indebted to his long reading in Hughes, was apparently rejected 72 times (it was finally published by Chaucer Press in 2005). But then what would you expect? ‘Manchester is advertising for a chair in Critical Theory,’ Sagar reports to Hughes disdainfully. ‘They are all ...”

“... I have since eaten many things in respectable restaurants with far more trepidation.Only from reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History did he learn that the eating of clay was a prehistoric habit, something that kept the stomach filled until the next kill of aurochs. When he met Toynbee, he mentioned his own experience of this primitive ...”