“... as well as the unbridgeable, while evoking something that is certainly dangerous to approach. Christopher Prendergast FranceTwo days before the Brexit referendum Le Parisien reported that 34 French businesses had written an open letter intended for the British press – the Sun was mentioned, along with the Times and the Telegraph. ‘French bosses beg ...”

“... tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née ...”

“... another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... been temporarily altered to ‘wholesome’ by the reactionary president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler.) Publishers who were ready to pay for both book and serial rights also expected a certain kind of product; and even as they sought to market Wharton as a ‘classic’, they worried that she was too grim or out of touch for their ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s ...”

“... captain, of Jews by Nazis, Russians by Communists, Oliver Twist by Bumble, of Smike by Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby was one of Canetti’s early and passionate enthusiasms)? For such an artist, the inner world, the world of his invention, cannot and should not be any different from the world of human and historical reality. In his study of Kafka Canetti ...”

“... to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace ...”

“... battle-lines are not too clearly drawn. You can make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or ...”

“... and division exactly where, in the case of the Middle East, there is none of either. Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Steven Solarz, to mention two Contra opponents, are supporters of everything Israel does, and when the connection between the Contras and the Israelis was made public there was a noticeable avoidance of blame for Israel. The ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and ...”

“... on the bandwagon. But the press ignored this. ‘The story was in the bag before I even spoke,’ Nicholas Holgate, Kensington and Chelsea Council’s town clerk, told me. ‘As a civil servant for 24 years and a local government officer for eight and a half years I was trained to be impartial, objective and evidence-driven. None of that was evident in the ...”