“... imperative of Greenblatt’s opening sentence: ‘Let us imagine that Shakespeare … ’ James Shapiro has no truck with such surmise. Though he too is plagued by the biographer’s hankering to enter the playwright’s mind – ‘to know … what his political views were, whom he loved, how good a father, husband and friend he was, what he did with ...”

“... novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably – from ...”

“... the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these ...”

“... 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC (Fox, the fourth network, was launched in 1986). A harbinger of the new mode was the late Garry Shandling’s faux-documentary comedy about a chat show, The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), which he co-produced and co-wrote for HBO, and starred in as the eponymous ...”

“... in a lingeringly explicit scene of sexual entrapment accompanied by the howls of an urban fox. But her heart isn’t in the vengeance (or, come to that, in the call of the wild). Ending the feud enables her to resume the proper exercise of care and attention. The bulldog didn’t make it, but she’s pleased to meet its successor on the street, and to ...”

“... that the Brexit Party fielded two former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party – Claire Fox and James Heartfield – among its MEP candidates. Support for no deal correlates directly with age, to the point where the majority of over-sixties now express support for Farage. It is also most entrenched among the ...”

“... civilisation ruined thanks to Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude ...”

“... of Edinburgh and thirty miles north of the English border, which her great-great-great-grandfather James and his family left in 1818. Much painstaking research must lie behind the facts assembled here; even so, she seems able to reach back with exceptional ease, accessing not only the usual meagre birth and marriage and death dates, but rich resources of ...”

“... If the world should end tomorrow,’ James Agee wrote in the Nation in 1947, ‘this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.’ A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film’s second part ‘half-baked’, and what’s interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view ...”

“... who had been an outstanding chancellor of the exchequer. Even failures at the Treasury, such as James Callaghan, sometimes become party leaders, and a highly successful chancellor like Clarke should have been in an overwhelmingly strong position for the job. This was particularly so as there was no other clearly suitable candidate. Nevertheless, Europhobia ...”

“... are deeply envious of Reza Aslan’s stroke of luck in encountering a particularly stupid Fox News reporter during his round of publicity interviews for this book. Apparently having got no further than the publisher’s blurb in wrestling with the work, she asked Aslan why he as a Muslim had written a study of the life of the founder of ...”

“... a couple of hours later, things had changed dramatically. Arizona had been called for Biden by Fox News and the betting markets were moving back his way. Calmer heads – including the data analysts at FiveThirtyEight – were pointing out that there was a long way to go in the counting for the other swing states, given the number of postal ballots ...”

“... been an adder. Cycling brings you close to this casual carnage. Toads, rabbits, hares, the odd fox or deer. Your heart sinks every time you approach a dollop on the road. If it turns out merely to be a pair of discarded trousers, you feel absurdly cheered. Kilchoan’s new-for-the-Millennium community centre’s haunted by clarsach music, and a video ...”

“... wrote a friend a letter that could equally well apply to the Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught ...”

“... at Waltham Cross. Perhaps the Surtees Society will do something for ‘the novelist who hunted the fox’. It would be a mistake to surmise from this that Trollope’s actual fiction has gone the oblivious way of Surtees’s, or Mrs Oliphant’s or Charles Lever’s. The Penguin English Library, the Dover reprint series and the new paperback World’s Classics ...”