“... He was not the sort of person who succeeded in turning his life into a work of art. When C.S. Lewis wrote of ‘a hideous moral spoonerism: Giant the Jack-Killer’, he was passing judgment on Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, rather than commenting on the despot’s actual career. But there is something depressing about that, too. His armies are always ...”

“... loss of $25 billion.Journalists don’t need to be in the UK to be targeted with a Slapp action. Paul Radu, a Romanian investigative journalist at the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, was sued by an Azerbaijani MP over a series of reports about alleged money-laundering involving the Azeri elite. The case ran for almost two years before it ...”

“... and whom he presumably doesn’t wish to fight are not writers. ‘I can make a landscape like Mr Paul Cézanne, I learned how to make a landscape from Mr Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr Paul were ...”

“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... a plea for a new canonical openness and for the relevance of Southey to the Romantic scene. Paul Hamilton’s ‘Keats and Critique’ argues that ‘the interchangeability in Keats’s poetry of its ideal status and its political reticence gradually begins to expose the contemporary politicising of the ideal and the idealising of the ...”

“... by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, reinforced the ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an ...”

“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... come the writer nobs: Jack Kerouac, ‘babbling on with the fluency of a jammed beer-tap’, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ‘demand that intellectuals should “integrate with the masses” seems even more unreal than it would otherwise, coming from a man who could not bear to face an orange’. It does seem a bit doubtful that plain bread-earners share these ...”

“... daftness of much of what we think about the mind. Shainberg’s epigraph comes appropriately from Lewis Carroll: a certain logical vertigo is perhaps the chief effect we register. ‘Could anyone in his right mind idealise such disorder?’ Drogin asks himself at one point. The answer is no, but he is not in his right mind, and may never get back. The ...”

“... of fraud the authors deal with. All the old favourites are to be found in the index: Piltdown, Paul Kammerer of The Midwife Toad and the infamous William T. Summerlin. This last is the only case of a fraud in which I have been involved as a witness for the prosecution: Summerlin worked at the largest cancer research institute in the world, the ...”

“... who knew the difference between right and wrong. Not even that Duke of Newcastle described by Sir Lewis Namier had more patronage at his disposal than Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed: and Sir Robert Walpole and his successors were vulnerable to visits from grandees, who called on him with the word that it was time for a change. As a friend of mine, a Conservative ...”

“... us feel proportionally large). At times the emphasis which the book places on scale is worthy of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland: We are completely out of proportion in the tea-house Until we arrange around a single earthenware bowl Ourselves, the one life, the one meeting, a ribbon of water And these makeshift ideograms of wet leaves, green tea. Longley’s ...”

“... of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I ...”

“... becoming Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford. It is possible that Paul Kraus, the half-crazed student of Arab alchemy and another of Hourani’s friends, was murdered in Cairo in 1944, because of a suspected connection with the assassins of Lord Moyne. Hourani’s own life, however, was, outwardly at least, a tranquil affair ...”