“... tries to speed Britain into joining the ‘newly submerging countries’ it is useful to have so sharp and yet so complicit a description of our vulnerability. Radji records only one person who refused his hospitality: Philip Roth (though there were others). The title is apt. Radji was indeed ‘in the service’ of a narcissistic and obsessive monarch, a ...”

“... for the population as a whole. Sometimes I say I have mild gender dysphoria: I like my life as Stephen just fine, so long as I get to be Stephanie now and again. At the merchandise fair, I was shocked to see myself in a hairdresser’s mirror after I tried on a shoulder-length wig: I no longer looked like a pretend girl or a woman, like someone trying ...”

“... the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were local people, often the sailors who were his on-off lovers, sitting or dancing at ...”

“... empire happened not only abroad but also in the minds and imaginations of Britons at home. Neither Stephen Daniels’s collection of essays nor those in Roy Porter’s Myths of the English explore the imperial-domestic connection directly. Yet both books illuminate its importance.To begin with, and as several of Daniels’s fine, perceptive essays ...”

“... at the time: but their victims suffered because they were weak, not because they all had the same sharp tongue and exigent temperament as Lydia Lawrence. Arthur Lawrence’s younger brother killed his 15-year-old son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male ...”

“... sociologist thinks that tells us anything about mobility, though some economists do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but ...”

“... Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh ...”

“... words, of life on Mars at one time, even if not now. When they made the announcement there were sharp intakes of breath in space science departments everywhere. (Altogether, 12 meteorites have been identified as bits of Mars, chipped loose in a bygone catastrophe – a collision with something big, like an asteroid or comet – which had spun around the ...”

“... languages of the eastern Congo’, plus French. So it’s reasonably plausible that his ‘needle-sharp ear’ would detect ‘the trace of an English public school accent’ beneath ‘the colloquialisms’ when someone says: ‘Please yourself, mate.’ Salvo makes little jokes about his abilities, as when someone speaks with ‘what my top interpreter’s ...”

“... is among the great achievements of the Labour government. He appointed the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder, which understandably is one of the things he is most proud of. His record on race, as on gay rights, has been consistently liberal. On the other hand, though he was no longer home secretary when the Freedom of Information bill was ...”

“... moss. Utterly lacking in coherence and consistency, it ranges from lulling gentleness to cruel, sharp insights.’ The Ruin of Kasch is not pure bricolage, however. Calasso may move effortlessly from Pol Pot to Goethe, or from discussion of the Vedas to Richard Cobb’s favourite uncle, but in the process he is always rehearsing the same ideas about ...”

“... met in my life I would apply the word “genius” to’, one colleague has said. Some go further: Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. From early on, Penrose knew that he was intellectually exceptional, and he understood both ...”

“... antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less well. This side of the Stephen Lawrence case and the phone-hacking trials neither has the same level of credibility they enjoyed in the 1970s.Born in 1934, Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick ...”

“... for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known. He silently put ...”

“... At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject ...”