“... Baudelaire on Callot, Donald Hall on Munch, Hollander on Monet and dozens more, including Richard Wilbur’s exquisitely meditative imitation of a Baroque wall fountain, a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than any other I know.* The painting of Howard Hodgkin is a first-rate example of the vivid muteness that resists critical ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was ...”

“... capital to be raised by a candidate who exploited the resentment engendered by defeat. (He may have had in mind the efficacy of the ‘who lost China?’ fantasy of the Fifties, but I don’t think that the ‘stab in the back’ psychosis of his German boyhood can have been far from his mind either.) At all events, the year 1968 found him advising the ...”

“... that this is not an issue which I am strongly minded to open up at this stage,’ and ends with ‘may I reiterate’ thanks to me for chairing the 1991-93 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (which is, I suppose, all the nicer since in fact it’s the first thanks I’ve had from him). He tells me to go and talk to John Wakeham, which I do. Wakeham is as ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... of the royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself unlawful, having been levied by the Crown without the authority of Parliament. The court refused to hear the ...”

“... claimed that network censorship made him and his writers more creative, which is as may be; what’s certain is that it defanged American comedy and completely eliminated the phallic fun of an earlier era’s low-comic hijinks. Harpo’s horn, Chaplin’s cane, W.C. Fields’s walking stick, Groucho’s cigar – the accoutrements of aggression ...”

“... in the story and causal in the plot, but this seems to be too elementary to get us far, and we may begin to see why Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and other Russian Formalists thought they needed the distinction between fabula and siuzhet. The difference is clear enough (too clear) if we think of real-life stories and plots. The fabula is what happens sequentially ...”

“... in the desert south of Las Vegas. (‘Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed; he only began to soften when he heard that ...”

“... begins: ‘They were a hangdog-looking pair as they rode into Liphook on that sunny morning in May. One was short and weedy, with bony shanks and a hungry countenance, the other was a little taller and a deal bulkier, but bloated of face and generally flabby. They were dressed in a soiled and tawdry imitation of their betters, and each looked every inch ...”

“... on this day or that, or awaiting the birth of the Shiloh to the 65-year-old Joanna Southcott. It may be that some variety of myth concerning the End is necessary to everybody, but there can be no doubt that the forms of it that have prevailed in our culture were established by the Bible – by Daniel, Revelation, and the ‘little apocalypse’ of Mark and ...”

“... and highly perceptive, it’s the first book for a long time that I’ve wanted to put beside Richard Usborne’s Clubland Heroes. The Nine Literary Studies of Dorothy Sayers are, in fact, less literary than biographical and bibliographical. They detect mysteries about things like publication date or the pseudonymous works of her husband. There are a lot ...”

“... in living standards – ‘Now there appears to be but one order of people, a middle Class as they may be called’ (Tuesday, 14 September) – while deploring the general lack of decorum. Madame Récamier comes in for censure on the low cut of her dress. There are also revealing accounts of major artistic and political personalities, including a description ...”

“... to die young, preferably of consumption. Their women, if their tastes lie in this direction, may be called to matrimony and motherhood: but they are seldom given to authorship, and they are not encouraged to own independent musical personalities. These preconditions leave a clear field for the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters or the industry of ...”