“... a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B.Phil. philosophy exams. It was quite an ordeal (I nearly ...”

“... through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped confines of the Six Gallery, an auto-repair shop at Union and Fillmore in San Francisco. Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious ...”

“... extraordinary ceiling mural depicting cavorting monkeys in 18th-century dress, executed c.1914 by John Alden Twachtman, who took inspiration from similar murals painted c.1730 by Christophe Huet at the Château de Chantilly, can now be admired. Elsewhere, architectural features – ranging from decorative marble and ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... also phoning it in. Witness the completely pointless recent remake with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot. John Malkovich is about to impersonate the great detective in a Christmas adaptation of The ABC Murders – now that one I’m looking forward to.) A novel in which the detective did it. A novel in which the entire structure of the story was suggested by a title ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... a guarantee of $29 billion against the bank’s mortgage liabilities – basically, the government took on the risk of the dodgy mortgages, in order to make the rest of the bank viable for purchase. They did so because they were worried about the risk to the rest of the banking system if Bear Stearns collapsed and a ‘chaotic unwinding’ of the financial ...”

“... for Point Counter Point. He lacked Waugh’s genuine passion for snobbery and religion, and took time to develop his own disagreeable substitute for humour, exemplified by the moment in Brighton Rock when the nice girl Ida, foolish enough to enjoy the simple sentimentalities of life, weeps in the crematorium as ‘Fred became part of the smoke nuisance ...”

“... with them of fifteen billion dollars because of the distorted price structure.’ Gaidar’s line took two years to work its way through the system and remains an area of contention even now. For the moment Gaidar himself has retired, leaving the field to men who do not wish to treat the other Republics as sovereign states, and who are actively attempting to ...”

“... generally agree that several dozen Jews were killed. Because Davies is writing about an event that took place in 1944, he doesn’t need to give much attention to Polish-Jewish relations. By that point the Warsaw Ghetto had been razed, and its more than 500,000 residents killed, some of them in the death camps, others in the fighting. At most, several thousand ...”

“... L’Insurgé is dedicated ‘To the dead of 1871. To all those victims of social injustice who took up arms against a crooked world and formed the great federation of sorrow beneath the flag of the Commune.’ This third volume in fact serves as a memorial to the ultimate and most terrible of the defeats Vallès had met with in his life, when the Paris ...”

“... happen’), and as a human being who must live like a man of this world under the moral law. Auden took a Freudian view of Dante, as a poet who craved for his poetry to bring him ‘honour, power, riches and the love of women’. It might have been worth Steve Ellis’s while to mention Auden as a case of the on the whole silent majority of English poets who ...”

“... de Musset was so brief, or the nasty circumstances in which she eventually broke with Chopin (who took her problem daughter’s side against her mother): in retrospect, she’s prepared to be harsh towards herself alone. The outrageous Baudelaire laid the blame for her doveishness on the Devil, ‘who has persuaded her to trust herself to her kind heart and ...”

“... see what a hand you write’ in the later version. ‘O how I was sham’d! – He, in my Fright, took it,’ Pamela recalls. Her exclamation was first ‘corrected’ to ‘O how ashamed I was!’ and then removed completely. Yet, in its clumsiness and incorrectness, it more accurately conveys Pamela’s sense that she has done nothing wrong, though she is ...”