“... many documents and interviewed dozens of helpful people, many of them now dead. But the assiduous Michael Shelden has found lots more paper, and interviewed not only the survivors on Crick’s list but others whom his predecessor did not come upon. His book is as long as Crick’s and inevitably repeats much that is in the earlier work, so it was all the more ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the ...”

“... he or she is from. He discusses the work of writers from a great variety of backgrounds: Brian Moore, Mary Gordon, Thomas McGonigle and Michael Stephens. Stephens’s work, he says, is best read alongside that of the African-American Trey Ellis, the Latina Sandra Cisneros and the Scot James Kelman, rather than other ...”

“... during the Blitz, mostly kept out of the news at the time. Several hundred of those whom Henry Moore ennobled in his wartime drawings of shelterers in the Tube were crushed, drowned or suffocated in catastrophes at Marble Arch, Balham, Bank and Bethnal Green. In 1975 there was the macabre case of Driver Newson, who careered full force into the buffers at ...”

“... had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of Cambridge University Library.This was the period in which institutional and civic libraries emerged after the traumatic dispersal ...”

“... without maps. ‘Guilty but Insane’ was Ian Gilmour’s heading for his Spectator review of Michael Foot and Mervyn Jones, whose Suez book Guilty Men 1956 is still one of the best accounts of the collusion. The Spectator has often made trouble for the Tory leadership, with Iain Macleod’s bean-spiller on ‘The Magic Circle’ being the benchmark ...”

“... doubted or questioned. Dennis comes to mass because he cannot bear to let Angela out of his sight. Michael comes but never takes communion; he believes himself to be in a state of mortal sin because he masturbates. Miles is a recent convert and enjoys the ritual, which the born Catholics never think about. In Chapter One they are all virgins. In Chapter Two ...”

“... reasonably expect to find under the Christmas tree. The force at work here is a principle known as Moore’s law. This isn’t really a law at all, but rather the extrapolation of an observation made by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company Intel. By 1965, ...”

“... the German model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of ...”

“... husband was calmer. George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’s Search for Reality. Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... in this public spot, from rocks that are now buried under the reclaimed land that is Sean Moore Park. After which: ‘He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.’Later in the day, as the sunset glows over these same rocks, Gerty MacDowell sits in a cosy nook beside the ‘sparkling ...”

“... a little thunderous, but not to the point of Mannerism, nor are his figures as stagey-grotesque as Michael Ayrton’s were. His line and colour are tart – compared with illustrations commissioned for cookery books today, almost brutal – but the world they create is welcoming. Before market research quantified the effectiveness of commercial art, and fine ...”

“... was too expensive to publish when I first wrote it. Now there’s a possibility that the Henry Moore Foundation might help a publisher, so a number of old conversations may yet see print. I was an inquisitive, I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do ...”