“... with a dark circle on its edge where the wood had been rubbed smooth. Above it was a notice that read: ‘Please put nothing on the ancient sill. This was the prayer-desk of the anchorites for several centuries.’ I knelt in front of it. If the floor had been at the same height in the medieval period, the desk would have been too high for an anchorite to ...”

“... a place in some literary equivalent of Wisden (‘the largest number of multi-volume histories read by a Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... of that famous list of Communist sympathisers Orwell was compiling in his last years. He has read many letters not previously accessible – for example, a great many to Orwell’s agent Leonard Moore – which make it even clearer than it already was that the writer and Victor Gollancz didn’t get on, though not ...”

“... I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza ...”

“... them, as she puts it with characteristic vagueness, or because, more mundanely, they have time to read several newspapers and thus to assimilate all points of view. Touchingly, the inveterate reformer suggests that the confinement of the sick helps to restore their faith in human progress – the gradual ‘amelioration’ of things being much more visible to ...”

“... down on his orders.Harry Freedman​ has written varied books about Jewish history and culture: on Leonard Cohen’s spiritual sources; the Talmud; the Kabbalah; Britain’s Jews. In Shylock’s Venice, he has taken a broad brush to the history of Venice’s Jews, producing a book of lightly informative anecdotes about various residents of the ghetto, or ...”

“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...”

“... business to prescribe what other people should have and what they should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the ...”

“... from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after ...”

“... loses sight of man himself. On the evidence of this book, as of his best recent films, we can now read ‘and Françcois Truffaut’ in that sentence alongside ‘Jean ...”

“... which Crosland himself would probably not have relished, a good way to see how wrong he was is to read the volume of essays which Messrs Lipsey and Leonard have dedicated to his memory. Not, it must be admitted, that they themselves concede anything of the sort. On the contrary, they have managed to turn their mentor ...”

“... heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.’ It’s a way of being both alive and dead within a single sentence.In the early 1970s Johnson did an MFA at the University of Iowa and came under the influence of Raymond Carver, who had yet to receive his late acclaim and was still in full-blown ...”