“... Bildung – her engagement with Communism, feminism, psychoanalysis and Sufism – is often read by literary critics as the symbolic history of our age, just as ‘D.H. Lawrence’s proposal that the Industrial Revolution began in the Eastwood of his boyhood and was finally exorcised in the woods of the Chatterley estate is a received fact of literary ...”

“... States. Certainly, the framers of their Constitution knew it well enough, because they, too, had read Thucydides, who loomed large in their discussions. But he loomed for the fairly obvious reason that although democracy had been born in Europe, it never lasted all that long there, because Europe, from the very earliest days, was always being torn apart by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... bushes in the Sierras, and an assistant to a Japanese gardener; I twice started graduate school, read a great deal, and even taught myself Latin and German. Virtually none of this went into my writing.’ ‘Instead,’ Solotaroff ruefully recalls, ‘I laboured on my few ironic tales of empty lives.’ Most writers, when they begin to write, are actually ...”

“... on writing in Hungarian, but in time she came to see this as a dead end; if she wanted to be read – by her friends, her children, her neighbours – she would have to write in the language of her new home. In 1984, the year she turned 49, she sent the manuscript of a novel to three publishers in Paris. An editor at Seuil took a chance on the unknown ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... the Formalists would say, is conveyed in the selection of poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, and in France’s excellent study Poets of Modern Russia, which besides that on Pasternak contains informative essays on Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and the poets of today. A particularly admirable feature of this Cambridge ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the moment when they were written, whether from Victorian and Edwardian confidence in robust parliamentary government, or from post-imperial decline, or the ...”

“... admit that, while telling a good story, his biography offers little close reading of the poems. Peter Levi’s Tennyson is particularly strong in this department; ‘Poetry is what makes him mysterious,’ he tells us. Levi’s long first section, ‘The Birth of the Poet’, is an illuminating investigation of Tennyson’s childhood reading, and its ...”

“... of his generation. In the 15th essay of this volume he tells the German social democrat, Peter Glotz, that his ‘political activities today, such as they are, do not depend on whether I am in the Communist Party or not’. But the manner in which he has to defend these activities, at least as it appears in this book, is directly influenced by his ...”

“... home. Before taking the 22 nembutals which killed him, Halliwell left a suicide note: ‘If you read his diary all will be explained. K.H. P.S. Especially the latter part.’ In fact, the diaries only complicate the picture – particularly Orton’s reputed lack of feelings. When Halliwell is threatening suicide, Orton suddenly erupts: ‘I won’t have ...”

“... as ‘Lefty’), in which the silversmiths of Tula make a life-sized flea out of metal to show Peter the Great they are as skilled as their English counterparts. Whether Benjamin didn’t read the story, or had forgotten the details by the time he wrote about it, he mischaracterises it. They are gunsmiths, not ...”