“... During my solitary evenings I have been reading the two volumes of Thomas Hardy’s biography by Robert Gittings. I have just finished it and this recalls to me Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, which I actually attended. Or rather the funeral of most of him: his heart had been left behind in Dorsetshire. I suppose I was one of the ...”

“... like brothers, and families which stoically accept their lot, and find their truth in Robert Westall’s novels of the Second World War. Alison Lurie, claiming that the best children’s books are ‘on the subversive side’, has said that ‘most of the lasting works of juvenile literature express feelings not generally approved of or even ...”

“... high on his achievements and the esteem of his peers. ‘He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this,’ Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos project, wrote to a colleague. Another eminent elder physicist, Eugene Wigner, described him as ‘a second Dirac, only this ...”

“... however, is that Maurice Cowling understood the age of Carlyle better than anyone else. It was the young Carlyle, in all his Scottish revolutionary glory, who captured it best. His tragedy, which was even more so that of Jane Welsh Carlyle, is that somehow London and all its works corrupted his vision and his will and his art. Other reviewers of this book have ...”

“... novel. Clarke wrote about the penal settlements, more recently and more harshly described by Robert Hughes. While Carey’s hero was held in such places he was flogged with unforgettable violence, his back permanently scarred and furrowed, and two of his fingers severed. (There was a specially destructive New South Wales double ‘cat’.) Having made ...”

“... on that sex had almost always just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory ...”

“... meetings of the Group in Philip Hobsbaum’s flat: ‘There we would be sitting, aspirants all, young teachers, lab technicians, civil servants, research students, undergraduates, and Arthur, who … seemed to know every poem ever alluded to, from whatever language, [but] sat there among us as if he too were just beginning.’ When I first became interested ...”

“... On 22 March​ , Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and its possible connection with the Trump campaign, submitted his report to William Barr, the US attorney general. Two days later, Barr sent a letter to Congress summarising the two main conclusions of the report ...”

“... to the hyper-rational world. He didn’t pose as a guru like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that there’s more than one way of ...”

“... food tins . . . soiled mattresses and old magazines filled with pictures of naked young men and women’. The story’s insider-perspective makes demands of its presumed audience: the readers who are implicitly being asked to sympathise with the Japanese-American family cannot all be Japanese-Americans. Indeed, part of the point may be to ...”

“... biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging sentences from Robert Baldick’s translation of A rebours. And when all else fails, the literary pose gives licence to cod-Proustian long-windedness, replete with ‘it is perhaps’, ‘that which’ and the bogus ‘precisely’. Here, for example, is how he expresses the ...”

“... think about the names of the family members: Partita (the sister), Carl Fidelio (the brother) and Robert Eroica (our hero). Within the plot the father was no doubt confusing destiny with a joke when he came up with these names, but Carole Eastman, the very sharp writer of the movie, must have been after something else: an implication perhaps that music, like ...”

“... Africa. Tranströmer, who died last year, trained as a psychologist and all his life worked with young people. Literature – which meant a dozen short volumes of poetry (not more than 250 pages, all told) and a vivid and attractively straightforward memoir of his childhood, also short, called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for ...”

“... of that secular powerhouse, the Hebrew University, religious orthodoxy rules in Jerusalem, and young ‘secular’ Israelis are deserting the city in droves. These are not just two different cities; they are two different Israels. A desperate longing for ‘normality’ exists alongside stern reminders, from the new ideologues of the right, of Israel’s ...”

“... ethos that is impatient of history as it is impatient of attachment to place. Jonathan Wright is a young historian and seemingly an outsider, and his attitude to his subject is placid but sympathetic: notably sympathetic to contemporary Jesuits pursuing social and political justice, but unfussed by reactionaries, and agreeably complimentary to those who simply ...”