“... of going on.Murdoch became world famous as a novelist, and is the subject of a fine biography by Peter Conradi, but the lives of the others are not so well known. Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley all came from middle-class families in suburban London. Their abilities were evident early, and they were encouraged to go to university. Not so Foot. Philippa ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... a well-publicised theory that Jewish Bolsheviks were behind the troubles in Ireland. According to Peter Martland’s commentary on the MI5 files recently made available at the National Archives, Joyce also joined the ‘K’ society, a.k.a. the ‘Inner Organisation’, a shadowy group of thugs who specialised in disrupting Communist meetings. These were ...”

“... it plain he ‘would not return alive’. Using the alias ‘Omar Hakim’, he also accompanied Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen of CNN to the caves. Bergen was sufficiently struck by his intensity and intelligence to talk about him in his book on al-Qaida, Holy War Inc; only later did he become aware of al-Suri’s ...”

“... to Lydia Davis, say?) and the letters are not interesting in themselves, but they are worth reading to hear how much more herself she is in the stories. In the letters, curiously, she sounds like just anyone. She even goes through that phase where you open with salutations like ‘Hello you no good wenchy slut’, drawn for some reason in rose-garden ...”

“... him to manipulate, in this case with Traubel’s help, the disposition, recovery and subsequent reading of important documents, a process that creates some measure of suspense and unpredictability in an account of the final years that might, over so long a work, degenerate into a record merely of illness and decline. The mess functions as an archive for the ...”

“... that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary’: like Chesterton, another of his heroes, Carey professes an ‘amazement at normality’. Ordinary things ...”

“... all times emphasised his spiritual kinship with fellow Swabians like Hegel, Hölderlin and Johann Peter Hebel (a writer of enchanting Alemannic folk-tales). He saw himself as a contributor to this tribal lineage, and associated his writings with it; his biographer reports on this powerful rural mystique, and is (as far as I know) the first author to do so ...”

“... sensitive bus named after me in Leeds. I just wish it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the ...”

“... people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus.’ Generally, Mars-Jones’s prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained, very English, with a little Nabokovian velvet too. He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting. This description of John’s mother ...”

“... There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a patronising amateur. ‘Socially,’ Odom said, ‘I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass.’ Kissinger, cross with Edward Heath, actually suspended intelligence ...”

“... lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too ...”

“... bang, but not before we’ve been filled in at inordinate length on the heroine’s dreams and reading habits and her extensive family network of shabby-genteel Southern types. Tartt, who grew up in Mississippi, told an interviewer: ‘Everything went into The Little Friend for a decade. It’s all there.’ She wasn’t joking, and beyond the suffocating ...”

“... did in those days when they’d elected to be married to great men. She wrote in her diary after reading his 1956 novel, Homecoming, that I hope he gets his due now. I have no doubt … that posterity will give it him. It is deep & true & heart-rending: & for once – for him – joyful. [I] needed to be alone with C., and close to him, just to let him know ...”

“... generations. A fifth study began in 2000 – the story is that it was set up at the behest of Peter Mandelson as a more enduring way of marking the millennium than a big wheel or a dome – and has been following around 20,000 children born between late 2000 and early 2002. A sixth study was planned for 2015. The Life Study was to be the biggest ...”