“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...”

“... add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (Agapē Agape does recall Concrete, a Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the end, as the dying man works to get his ...”

“... the high point of the extraordinary seven-year run that came to a climax in 1957 with Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’. ‘If I could find​ a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars,’ Phillips said in the early 1950s. That white man walked into his ...”

“... There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against ...”

“... exact music’. Brown learned much from musical masters such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Eliot and Dylan Thomas, although at his best he could cut free from them and write with a plain clarity: A silent conquering army, The island dead, Column on column, each with a stone banner Raised over his head. A green wave full of fish Drifted far In wavering westering ...”

“... the most bizarre scholarly collaborations ever, between the conservative, Jewish and Polish-born Lewis Namier and an English country gentleman of advanced Fabian opinions, Josiah Clement Wedgwood MP. In the late 1920s both men were made profoundly pessimistic by the rise of totalitarianism in Western and Eastern Europe. Namier sought refuge in 18th-century ...”

“... thwarted, but Biden was still chairman four years later when George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas. The story of those hearings has been told many times, but Marcetic adds to the picture. Biden had cut a deal with the Republicans a year before when Thomas was nominated to a lower judgeship: he promised he would get ...”

“... limits are his medium. Many of these poems are ponderings of historical events and personages – Thomas Müntzer, George III, the Battle of Jutland – written as if to make peace with them by understanding them. In these poems the poet’s mind is indeed turned outward: his interest in other people is disinterested, and he prefers ‘we’ to ‘I’, and ...”

“... could please approve the following payments for my number one military contact which are paid via Thomas Cook. Your email okaying them is all the paperwork necessary. The stories are: Recruit speared by drill sergeant – £3000 Drunken Sandhurst instructor sacked – £1000 Woman squaddie killed in Iraq – £500 ‘Of course,’ Brooks had ...”

“... with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’ or ‘goonswaggle’ to make the mixture effervesce – often seems to be pushing out of view very nasty things that it doesn’t want fully to acknowledge. The way his tales for adults can underlie the ...”

“... bright with insiderism as he treks around Fitzrovia with Tambimuttu, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dylan Thomas and the gang. ‘Senses were heightened, perceptions changed, new visions possible,’ he burbles, but even he finds it hard to convince himself that this heady atmosphere produced much in the way of even half-decent poetry and prose. Sinclair’s critical ...”

“... on the part of rather junior civil servants, and the minister nominally responsible, Sir Thomas Dugdale, resigned from office as a matter of principle. Such a situation is light years away from 1986, when a British prime minister is truculently unapologetic about the actions of civil servants, not remote from her as Dugdale’s were from him, but as ...”

“... 12a and talked about Switzerland (where he’d just been), and about James Joyce and Nabokov and Thomas Mann; about ‘The Broken Gong’, his unpublished book on Buddha’s use of language; about St John’s, his Oxford college; about Lewis, my sister’s cat; about the Quaker school in Kenya where I was born, and where ...”

“... would tell us about Christian charity and speak of Kant, Plato, Hegel, Aristotle, Jesus and Thomas Aquinas very enthusiastically, knowing that nine out of ten people in his audience had never heard of these philosophers.’ For Malik, culture was to be largely understood in terms of masterpieces produced (mostly) by dead white males. It is ...”