“... 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 ...”

“... of cultural epistemology, a skeleton key to a lock we’ve yet to find?’ Well, I look forward to reading that book. Marcus hasn’t written it. Instead, a lot of uncollected reviews and jottings up to thirteen years old have found a retirement home, on the cart-before-the-horse principle that Elvis’s ubiquitous presence in popular culture means you can ...”

“... she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique shop. He ...”

“... which cannot be resolved by the understanding each of them individually promotes. Interspersing my reading of If not now, when? with episodes of Heimat proved in other respects to be a startling way of bringing Primo Levi’s book into focus. I was especially struck by the difference between these works in their attitudes towards the past, and by the ...”

“... as one of the first volumes of the complete works of George Orwell, for which the editor, Dr Peter Davison, uses Orwell’s original manuscripts, letters and proofs to establish the text that Orwell would have wished to have. In the case of this work, among the most personal and directly political of Orwell’s writings, he has made particular use of the ...”

“... architect. That they should do so is shocking: the process by which they did so is essential reading for anyone interested in the operations of power in this country. The heart of the book concerns the action, or inaction, of professional and public bodies when confronted with established facts relating to the conduct of their members, and it exposes the ...”

“... suitability for this role: twenty years ago, in Three Philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach treated Frege alongside Aristotle and St Thomas, two philosophers whose usefulness has often been their magisterial quality and the ways it can be appropriated. There are good reasons for assigning this kind of role to Frege. He writes in a ...”

“... from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and ...”