“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... such as the regime’s diplomacy in the Baltic – were inspired as much by Cassiodorus’ reading of Tacitus as by any realistic knowledge of the Aesti. Much of the interest of the Variae lies in their deliberately cultured and recherché content, though reading any quantity of late Roman officialese requires a ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to allow me to do an extended A-Level essay on Wordsworth’s political beliefs. I chugged ...”

“... many ways of life to an end, including our own. The stakes could hardly be higher. Why then does reading about it so often feel like reading about any other dysfunctional workplace? The relentless backstabbing and arse-licking seem out of kilter with the seriousness of the situation. It makes for a deeply strange and ...”

“... mina, shekel and apportionments of silver’. Belshazzar demanded exegesis. The winner of the reading competition was one of the Judaean deportees, the magico-mythical Daniel. Not only can Daniel read Aramaic – why ‘the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers’ could not remains a mystery – but he goes further, producing a virtuoso display ...”

“... as I’m padlocking my bike before going in. Today I see the young man who’s begging furtively reading a newspaper and I find myself not giving him anything for that reason. It’s as if, having grudgingly accepted that begging is an occupation, I expect it to be carried out with a proper degree of diligence, and if someone is going to beg half-heartedly I ...”

“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse ...”

“... at the Three Choirs festival in Gloucester as the text to Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony. Re-reading Whitman in the trenches took him, he told Marion Scott, ‘at the flood’. Everyone notes the same passionate camaraderie in Gurney’s recall of trench-life: Who died on the wires and hung there, one of two – Who for his hours of life had chattered ...”

“... and her uncle Ronald excelled, and which Punch, at its best, epitomised. In 1967 Fitzgerald was ‘reading Diary of a Nobody for the 20th time’, and Mr Pooter was undoubtedly an influence on one of the best comic creations of the letters, ‘Daddy’, the version of her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, who features in correspondence with their two ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... is not to suggest that such attention to Darwin has been absent: a full-length biography, by Peter Brent, appeared in 1981, for example, although Bowlby nowhere refers to it.) By and large, the most interesting recent scholarly treatments of Darwin, like those of other 19th-century scientists, have embedded their personal experience in its social and ...”

“... eccentric George Wigg, for whose memoirs Goodman admits to having rashly written a preface without reading the book. He has belonged to no political party, and has never married, claiming that neither abstention has caused him much regret. He denies the charge that he has a particular interest in libel actions, and claims to have taken the assaults of Private ...”