“... is that Kalanathi isn’t very good at writing. Having done so little of it, why should he be? As Julian Barnes wrote in his introduction to Daudet’s memoir, dying doesn’t make someone a better writer, or a worse one for that matter. Bad prose, muddled thinking and literary camouflage obscured for me the wisdom that others seem to have found in this ...”

“... Oops. I suspect I’m not the only person to have been caught out, since another contributor was Julian Barnes, who once said that signing a copy of one of his books to Rupert – at the request of Murdoch’s then-wife Anna – was ‘the sentence I am most ashamed of having written’. As Auberon Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to ...”

“... of the marketplace off against the sophisticated abstraction of ‘cognisance’. Realism,​ Julian Barnes says, is ‘essentially corrective’, and if you ask what Browning’s realism seeks to correct the answer is rather peculiar: it is the idea that the world is same-old-same-old. The beautifully poised way that Browning deploys the very word ...”

“... of Modernist authorship. Barnabooth was invented on his first trip to London after a visit to the Barnes branch of Boots the Chemist. Poems by a Rich Amateur was the pilot light of French Modernism; it was also a provocation and manifesto, and the young Valery’s camouflaged revenge on a stupid, authoritarian mother who had obliged him to accept legal ...”

“... employers, businessmen and the City; for big landowners, rich people and posh people.’ So wrote Julian Barnes, describing Blair’s arrival on the scene to readers of the New Yorker in 1994. Cameron has gone to great lengths to present himself as such a leader. The party has tentatively distanced itself from big business. Public sector workers are ...”

“... Politics are three-quarters drudgery, so it takes a special ingredient to enliven the diary of a politician. Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon wrote splendid diaries because they were not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts ...”

“... disasters, which seem to be tailor-made for the popular historian, present enormous difficulties. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters has a seriously witty chapter on the subject. Miles does not mention it, though it might have provided him with some useful observations on how a painter turns ‘catastrophe into art’. Recounted in ...”

“... a Classic cinema, or patronise the London Library, or join therapy groups. The characters live in Barnes or Chelsea, Maida Vale or (daringly) Hendon. In ‘Ripe’, by Alannah Hopkins, the central figure remarks: ‘I could go for weeks on end without ever being more than half a mile away from Piccadilly Circus. It got to the point where a taxi ride to ...”

“... of earlier styles is concerned, Thorpe exudes confidence: he’s well up to the standard set by Barnes and Ackroyd, say. (Not that judgment is really possible by non-specialists in the relevant periods: it wasn’t until a particularly unconvincing passage in the modern section – a conversation between three ‘youths’ who are required to mouth ...”

“... orders from heaven to read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and ...”

“... annual holidays in New York and the Riviera to local beauties. No such scruples inhibited Father Julian Henshaw, the Firbankian priest Carstairs brought in from Capri to preside over the spiritual life of the island: on his merry way to drinking and fox-trotting himself to death, he delighted in pederastic idylls with his Whale Cay choirboys.As the years ...”

“... artists with sceptical fathers) – briefly entered Bouguereau’s classes at the Académie Julian, Van Gogh was already dead and Gauguin heading off to Tahiti. The last of the eight Impressionist exhibitions had taken place five years before. And what was Matisse painting? Brown still lifes. He said that the first time he really saw Impressionist ...”