“... and ‘in the last resort’ dealt ‘not with facts but with truth’. One thinks also of James Agate, who described not what happened but what he thought should have happened and called it ‘the higher truth’. Strachey, it seems, was not above inventing a ‘fact’ – he gave Dr Arnold short legs to make him look sillier. In Eminent Edwardians ...”

“... insult: that John Buchan belonged not, as the family piously hoped, in a Scots Valhalla with Scott and Stevenson (even if a long way downtable), but with two English writers of almost unbelievable crudity, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates. Despite defences of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her ...”

“... About​ two thirds of the way into Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is tied to a chair in the desert crater headquarters of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s grimacing and an uncontained scream ...”

“... Here, he makes a genuine contribution. Looming over Rakove’s account is the figure of James Madison, the diminutive, colourless Virginian who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ...”

“... girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the ...”

“... in war but hunting, fishing, shooting, whoring, drinking, fathering kids, being a friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce etc. The only way they noticed I injured myself was because I could not spell hemmorage and still cannot. But it is very easy to injure yourself up here. Everybody is drunk all the time – it is ...”

“... the question should be shelved for the moment. How near or far from the real thing is Sir Walter Scott, whose art intuits everything implied in the new genre and the new expectations, and who in Waverley specifically places the art world of Scottish picturesque history in opposition to the real bourgeois world of progressive England? In having things both ...”

“... a characteristic military balls-up.’ Early in April a new wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Scott, was parachuted in to join Frank, while Scott’s code-book was dropped to a wholly different unit ‘somewhere in Thrace’ – and this at a time when the unit’s headquarters were being transferred from Cairo to Bari ...”

“... or into deep space. The Nasa/METI map is a triumph of 21st-century technology and international co-operation. But amazing though it is, it’s in some ways less impressive than its distant pre-Sputnik ancestors, the new maps that could only be made by sending men beyond the edges of the old maps. Glyn Williams’s Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the ...”

“... as ‘a person without an alternative’, the very worst fate that can befall anyone in a Henry James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’. It’s a ...”

“... rushing at Casanova with a drawn sword, it was the wounded man who cried: ‘Canaille, respectez ce cavalier.’ Casanova’s honour was re-established, by his antagonist. ‘Posterity can only watch in amazement,’ Farrell concludes.Honour and the Sword is a wonderfully entertaining collection of paired mini biographies, told with great economy, bringing ...”

“... out-of-date beau and a not-yet-in-date subject of the once in a while and future king whom Henry James will christen Edward the Caresser. And at the centre of the novel is Professor Horace Nettleship, banked and glowering, a man whose geological hammer has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous parachronism of Bishop ...”

“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a ...”

“... James Hepburn opens his history of literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business ...”

“... has made this book so enticing. It was inevitable, given his background, that he would be drawn to Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist for whom Hollywood was the nemesis he needed. You understand that, no matter the phantom of success and splendour that Fitzgerald endured, his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the vanishing of Dick Diver at the ...”