“... testimony, power seldom looks alluring. The distended egos of New Labour grandees such as Peter Mandelson, and especially Prescott, float by from time to time, gas-filled blimps at risk of collision or spontaneous combustion. Mandy, prickly, imperious and unloved, falls, twice. Gordon Brown schemes to become leader, while his faction intrigues against ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... deeply confused about his sexuality, and at least part of his appeal to the teenage Ashbery, who read the New Directions edition of Poems not long after it was published in the US in 1941, was the combination of modernist obliquity and homoerotic undertones. ‘To a Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse ...”

“... from the dead. Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with ...”

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”

“... is the inspiration for the married woman Félix loves, the countess Henriette de Mortsauf. Balzac read his novel to de Berny shortly before her death – and, like Félix, he wrote about their relationship in a long letter, in his case to the woman he would marry, Eveline Hańska. De Berny described the book as sublime, but suggested he temper some of Madame ...”

“... of homosexuality mockingly set down. How could Paul Bailey (still known then by his given name of Peter) admit to being what his family called a pansy, or an Oscar Wilde. ‘I was a Battersea pansy, wary of displaying his true colours in the sunlight,’ since it was well known to the Baileys and their friends that there were no pansies in a decent ...”

“... IS SET RIGHT. Architects adore writing manifestos, the bigger the better, and even seem to buy and read them, if we are to judge by the number crowding the bookstore shelves. (In America, at least, they count as tax-deductible professional expenses.) A generation or two ago, these prophetic works were written in the language of the Futurists and the ...”

“... at this point the question arises: what is there, in this early life, that can be made much of? We read of changes of mood, from brief moments of elation to long days of gloom and depression; the theme ‘literature is death’ alternates with detailed hints on how to review your own short stories and novel and get your friends to put their names to the ...”

“... seditious and pessimistic work. Farewell to Europe is a sequel to The Missing Years. Having read the earlier novel less than a year ago, I was dismayed to find how little I remembered about it. To begin the new work was to recall why. Like its predecessor, it lacks fictional life because it is primarily an exercise in contemporary history. The Missing ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty ...”

“... into an ass. MacNeice weir quotes the passage in Marius the Epicurean in which Marius and Flavian read Apuleius’s book and relish his ‘unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift’s, and a genuine animal breadth’. Distinguishing between Apuleius’s syntax and Cicero’s, MacNeice doesn’t quite explain what the difference ...”

“... in disgracefully cowardly circumstances, when he was ejected by the then chairman of selectors, Peter May. It is necessary to know his approach to captaincy, which, as seen from the periphery, was the equivalent of riding a bike with your feet on the handlebars (he would argue that provided you don’t crash you would still get to the bottom of the hill ...”

“... the person of a king?’ ‘The King himself.’ To this extent, Prince Hal’s profligacy can be read as the son throwing the father’s imposture back in his face. The Donmar production wasn’t ‘giving the lie’ to the idea that this is a masculine play, as one reviewer suggested, or shifting the emphasis to the ‘similarity between the sexes’. In ...”

“... not an archive-man, and on this scale he couldn’t conceivably be one, but he is well and widely read, and has something to offer, even if it isn’t something of the highest quality, or anything that will refloat the subject in the historical mainstream. About the Jesuits’ missions in distant places, he says: ‘The one thing Jesuits almost always did in ...”