“... She is also a marvellous, canny writer. But in its new and expanded version (she has added a fuller account of Cather’s critical reception in the 1920s and 1930s and a concluding reflection on her ‘tragic sense of life’) her essay must also disquiet even the most jaded anti-academic. Were all the critical manoeuvres executed by Cather scholars over ...”

“... thinkers in the context of German intellectual and political history.’ There then follows a fuller account of what he said or wrote on each occasion and a review of how these interventions were received. Stern’s archives must be enormous. Even when he admits he knows little about a subject he usually gets good reviews and lets readers in on ...”

“... was Sydney, where Vivien Leigh would meet the man who demolished what remained of the great love, Peter Finch, and Olivier received the notorious letter from the chairman of the Vic’s board of governors informing him that his services, and Ralph Richardson’s, would not be required next season. The life of the Performer Royal had become a performance. It ...”

“... Several biographies (including that of Wolfgang Leppmann, who takes his cue in this respect from Peter Demetz’s study of 1953) have made much of the young René Rilke’s Pre-Raphaelite affectations, his appearances in an abbé’s black habit on the Prague corso, giving away ‘to the poor’ copies of his first collection of poems; and it is a ...”

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... the values which might teach us how to enjoy it.’ Jenkins shared Crosland’s commitment to the fuller expression of human personality, which helped make him such an appropriate and successful home secretary in the Swinging Sixties, but he also shared a wider optimism that economic growth would be a benign force, tending to reduce the worst forms of social ...”

“... to her about him with remarkable candour, some of them for the first time. It is hard to imagine a fuller documentation of one man’s life; in that respect Kavanagh’s is an exemplary modern biography, an ‘official’ biography that is also a tell-all biography, of great significance as a prism through which to view the social, sexual, cultural and ...”

“... in this new volume, more than two-thirds of which haven’t previously been translated, give us fuller access in English than we have had before to Luxemburg’s personal and political life. The selection is based on the German collection, Herzlichst Ihre Rosa (‘Warmly yours, Rosa’), edited by Georg Adler and Annelies Laschitza, published in 1989, which ...”

“... Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, produced by BIS in 2009 when Peter Mandelson was the minister. It should also be remembered that it was a Labour government that first introduced tuition fees (in 1998) and then ‘variable fees’ (in 2006). Variable fees turned out, of course, not to be variable, as all universities very ...”

“... and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of biography have not contributed: there is no Peter Ackroyd, no Hermione Lee, no Victoria Glendinning, though there are three entries by Claire Tomalin, including Katherine Mansfield and Ellen Ternan, and four by Michael Holroyd, including Augustus John. Given the (exaggerated) claims made for the dictionary ...”

“... my table, where I listen to BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one Saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate and a cup of green tea. It probably sounds nicer than I ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same ...”

“... managed to glean from me, but the knowledge that at any time I might be called upon to produce fuller details of personal description kept my imagination perpetually on the alert, and I gradually amassed substantial dossiers on both Linda and Tone, to be held in readiness at the back of my brain in case of sudden need. My ruse, though succeeding in one ...”