“... omitted. Faulkner’s ungrateful and ungracious treatment of his early mentor, Sherwood Anderson, may be charitably interpreted as youthful high jinks (although Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) ...”

“... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...”

“... in three of the most brilliant chapters in her new book – after Freud but not for Freud. David Aberbach, by contrast, is oddly impressed by how much Great Writers in the past knew about loss without having read John Bowlby. If new disciplines like psychoanalysis thrive initially on fantasies of purity, they can only be sustained by what looks like ...”

“... but that the appetite for conspiracies is insatiable – that’s why there are so many. This may well be a post-Kennedy perception, part of what the death caused rather than of what caused it. But against that we have to set everything we know about Oswald, let alone anyone else. He liked conspiracies, even if he wasn’t in one, even if he had to run ...”

“... any great comic debacle. One therefore turns to Jacobson’s second novel in the hope that he may have learnt something about construction. Jacobson likes salacious titles – though Coming from Behind scarcely lives up to its sexual promise – and Peeping Tom suggests something in the same mode as the first book. So do the early chapters, for Barney ...”

“... career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the old alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less substantial than a ...”

“... to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may have ‘pined by Arno’ for their ‘lovelier Tees’ – though that was just Macaulay’s Whiggish gloss. Several seem to have settled down quite happily in the milder climate. But the diplomats were kept busy by the rumours of plots and ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which ...”

“... France 2 had to fudge their story. Olivier Mazerolle, the director of the channel, resigned; David Pujadas, the news anchorman, was suspended for two weeks: journalists at the station had threatened to strike unless they went. In Lloyd’s account, bizarrely, the scandal of Juppé’s volte face is of interest only to the extent that it provides the ...”

“... government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office may have been the result of a proper disinclination on the part of a man who knew that his talents were inappropriate. He was accused by some of laziness.’ One conclusion of Brown’s biography, which was based on his Edinburgh PhD, was that the charge of ...”

“... media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... were profound. Roy Jenkins departed for Brussels; Anthony Crosland died tragically in office; David Owen succeeded him at the age of 38; and the scene was set both for the creation of a new centre party by the ‘Gang of Four’ and for its later disintegration. As Roy Jenkins says, although his conviction about the European Community was complete, his ...”

“... it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his voice broke, and he paused to dab at his ...”