“... I sorted them and took the piece to the Statesman’s office in Great Turnstile. When Karl had read it he said: ‘You’re a writer now.’ He was liable to make patriarchal remarks of that kind, and for better or worse – either way it’s a confession – I was very susceptible to them. When he gave me a second book and asked me to add a sentence at ...”

“... they violently disagreed. It was mostly after we’d run a piece by Edward Said. ‘I refuse to read pieces written by murderers,’ one of them said. ‘And we’re happy not to publish them,’ I said. ‘Said is happy to see Israelis bombed,’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Professor Said is happy to make arguments, and we are happy to publish ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in ...”

“... It can mean a memorial or a panegyric, it can mean a hatchet job, it can simply mean a good read (Wyndham Lewis once said that good biographies are like novels); or it can mean something scholarly, academic, definitive: a dull attempt to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – as far as that is possible. I have no wish to say that ...”

“... published in Le Soir, a newspaper of pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as endorsing what amounts to a collaborationist line. There is talk of the need to preserve national cultures against harmful ‘cosmopolitan’ influences; of the Jewish element in modern thought as a threat to this healthy condition; and of German ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... Coronation (1902) ‘was distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... employs a refined poetic diction. He is also, as some of this may imply, less pleasurable to read. Sun Poem is nothing if not structured. It has 12 sections, suggestive of an annual cycle, or of the hours between sunrise and dark; seven of these sections correspond to the colours of the rainbow, though in puns that have further dimensions ...”

“... and Benny Green identify her as a Gaiety Girl drowned the previous year at Goring: ‘Jerome read a report of the tragedy in the Berkshire Chronicle and decided to incorporate it into his story’). Jerome’s most successful serious play, though few would now grant it the second adjective, was The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in which a Christ-like ...”

“... later Yorkshire Tragedy a husband runs amok, killing two of his children and wounding his wife.I read these Elizabethan murder plays with the same guilty pleasure that I watch their modern counterparts, but their fondness for the ‘wicked wife’ stereotype is hard to enjoy. It runs counter to the actuality of domestic violence in this period. The records ...”

“... South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she says. But what she does know brings us almost into the room with him:Brother Robert kept his hair neat, using Dixie Peach pomade. He greased Vaseline ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... me, even if a player like Carlsen finds the accumulation of small advantages more satisfying. As I read this book, I started to realise what a hopeless task Butler had been assigned. Carlsen refused to spend any time with Butler, so he has to rely heavily on existing journalism. He sets out to illuminate Carlsen’s genius, but the paucity of new material ...”