“... habit of making at different stages of their careers. The last factor is more important than it may at first appear. Dickens, it is often observed, apparently embarked on working notes only with his fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and systematised the practice with Dombey and Son (1846-47), his seventh novel. Like other commentators, Stone ...”

“... is a bust of Hazlitt, looking noble, on three books of carved stone, labelled ‘Napoleon’. It may be that an admiring sculptor will add a head of Alan Brien, looking like an Arab ...”

“... oil has been utterly essential to Mrs Thatcher’s electoral success. Academics and commentators may ruminate on the Thatcher ethos and its effect on social attitudes, but the voters are looking in their pockets. The second undeserved bonus which Mrs Thatcher has been granted is a divided opposition. It is an obvious point but one which cannot be ...”

“... in Paris after she had moved there from Prague in the fall of 1925, suggests that Irma Kudrova may well be Tsvetaeva’s definitive biographer. In the breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her perception and intelligence, Kudrova is superior to subsequent biographers of Tsvetaeva, including – it must be admitted – myself. Irma Kudrova made two ...”

“... like Churchill’s riposte – ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages’ – may have been somewhat improved in the course of subsequent repetition, it nonetheless tells us much about Lloyd. Such anecdotes did not attach themselves to Eden or Macmillan, still less would either man have encouraged their propagation. Indeed Eden later ...”

“... that republic Qian Mu, gently nudged by Dennerline, reaches back to share his values with us. We may not accept or approve of them all, but it is hard to deny that there was something truly worth saying at the centre of his ...”

“... line of false assumptions that mesmerised Americans in Vietnam. ‘Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day,’ Henry Kissinger believes, ‘what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found ...”

“... an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry such that people in Caracas and Madrid knew they were simultaneously acting out their roles in, say, ‘1627 AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ...”

“... Minister, the crooked East End businessman Lord Brayley, had he lived to face the music. Wilson may have tried, as Leigh suggests, to act as honest broker with the Russians. On the other hand, he gave his unequivocal support to the American slaughter in Vietnam; to racialist immigration controls; to charges within the National Health Service; to statutory ...”

“... party is the seven-year-old adopted (grand)son of Iglaq’s own adoptive mother. Since Iglaq may neither complain to the child’s parents nor punish him – local people almost never intervene beyond the sphere of their immediate family – he quietly assimilates his loss and the subject is dropped. Aamnigauraq: ‘You live in England? They taken away ...”

“... and the regimen of the inhuman. Joseph de Maistre’s ‘night-vision’ in the Soirées may well be the principal feat of precise foresight in the history of modern political thought and theory. It makes the ‘futurology’ of Rousseau, of Hegel and Marx look utterly shallow. The age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and of ubiquitous ...”

“... gossip thinly disguised as fiction, prompted one suicide and general outrage. Unbelievable as it may seem, Capote failed to foresee that ‘La Côte Basque’ – named after a Manhattan restaurant – would rouse such enmity. Answered Prayers was to be his most ambitious work, an exposé of the very rich. Absurdly, he insisted on comparing his work in ...”

“... and, for some, surprisingly – to be charged with the murder. The trial is due to start in May, but serious doubts remain as to whether the evidence thus far mobilised against him – all of it circumstantial – is strong enough to secure a conviction. If the last three years have proved anything at all, it is that hope triumphs over experience with ...”

“... oeuvre real harm, not so much by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving sexuality enters the texture of his ...”

“... policeman humorously rejects Freddie’s account as a fantasist’s pack of lies. We readers may think we know better, but perhaps it is in our own interest to take sides. There is something sadly familiar about Freddie’s attempts – oh, in those studied sentences, that precise diction – to retrieve the past, reinvent himself, put two and two ...”