“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting where ...”

“... the snick and swing of tense shift could get away with the opening of the 1993 story ‘Comet’: Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a while since Adele had married and she wore white. It is the most radical economy to convey a life encompassing two marriages by repeating the ...”

“... of hospitality in 1575. Among other remodellings, Leicester had enlarged the windows of the Norman keep the better to show off his substantial collections of maps and paintings (their glassless shapes in the remaining walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in ...”

“... to me here. The only other place I have seen the word ‘corpun’ in print is in the Letters of Philip Larkin. As a neologism, it is as ugly as any one could contrive, but as a salacious expression and – apparently – as a piece of authentic Englishry, it was very close to his core.)The key phrase in Captain Waterhouse’s distraught peroration above is ...”

“... way the virus might be transmitted during intercourse, and particularly during anal intercourse. Norman Fowler conceded that the first campaign had had ‘next to no impact’. Grammar, as well as decency, caused arguments. Lord Hailsham wrote to Margaret Thatcher: ‘I am convinced there must be some limit to vulgarity! Could they not use the literate ...”

“... be accommodated and yet won’t nearly suffice. Amis once proposed ‘never being satisfied’ as Philip Roth’s great theme, but it is the boundless nature of need that he, too, endlessly celebrates and satirises. And if Amis is the poet of profligacy, the expert on excess, it is because he is himself full of what he might call male need-to-tell, what John ...”

“... texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did benefit from ...”

“... significant expression, often in the apocalyptic idiom constructed for the purpose and explored in Norman Cohn’s works. (Aldous Huxley, in Overy’s quotation, sees ‘Belial’s guiding hand’ in modern history.) There are good reasons in European history why the sense that ‘we’ – however defined – feel under threat from outside enemies or inner ...”

“... but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a minute, his scepticism having been awakened early on by the frontispiece (you can’t get much earlier in a book than its frontispiece), obviously had been taken in and felt ...”

“... of prejudice and convention, or the merely fashionable attraction of the Left for figures like Norman Podhoretz, who turns out to be really interested simply in Making It) they are coming to the same conclusion from very different angles. Brightman, I think, is tacitly accusing her subject of being obsessed, a trifle perversely, with the personal. McCarthy ...”

“... rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre and made official. The heroic virtue of the candidates had to satisfy the examiners. To ...”

“... of academic life, Stepping Westward and The History Man? I wondered, pondering his claim that in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire, the old woman who claims to have been Kafka’s whore ‘concentrates the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of ...”

“... the indispensable Eisenhowerist who naturally writes of the WSC-Eisenhower relationship, to Philip Ziegler, the tactful Mountbatten biographer who does for WSC and the monarchy, the contributors cover almost every imaginable WSC facet and interface, sometimes with considerable factual detail. The late D.J. Wenden provides chapter and verse and lots of ...”

“... from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could all die happy and go to deconstruction heaven. Though the ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating ...”