“... reflex disbelief in the cynical, or anyone who has actually visited the place. What is being said, loud and bold, online and on fences around hidden development sites, seems to be the absolute contrary of what is all too visibly there. That is the first rule of the river. And it leads to an unavoidable question: what are the consequences for these ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”

“... I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date back to the late 1940s and early 1950s and bring back all the dreariness of digs and Oxford out of term, Sunday lunches in cafés up ...”

“... who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze up her ...”

“... of communism, we are no longer sure that ‘the golden age is within us,’ as Lévi-Strauss said, but there’s no doubt that the apocalypse is. And the fear of nuclear war is heightened by the raw, primordial tenor of our politics, above all in the United States. What Pankaj Mishra has called an ‘age of anger’ is also an age of disinhibition, at ...”

“... of the best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket ...”

“... that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we go where it suits, and don’t bother about the people.’ Possibly because the staff was prepossessing, but also because the place was comparatively remote from more frequented scenes, an occasional ...”

“... with some degree of truth as ‘the disease so often found in English culture’. ‘Gentility,’ said Mr Alvarez at that time, ‘is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good.’ I doubt if there ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... in this biography, that warm, complicit smile was for everyone. I can’t remember much of what he said. This is because he never said much. He was one of those rare journalists whose way of listening makes other people open up and talk. That’s what this elusive man used his smile for. That, and to take attention and ...”

“... dismemberment of health, education and welfare? ‘I wants to make your flesh creep,’ said the fat boy, and that is what the parties set out to do in 1987. As Rodney Tyler’s book shows, the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their ...”

“... the difference between being titled and being entitled. When Kermode accepted the post of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he felt he had ‘become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown’. A knighthood is not a carnival crown, but the drift of this glancing and complicated book is that no ...”

“... realised the harm the footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. His body was discovered some days later. These events brought about a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained ...”

“... material; some were expressing private prayer; some were simply writing a poem. St Augustine said that all things written in the Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked into the ...”