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“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...”

“... business to prescribe what other people should have and what they should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the ...”

“... which Crosland himself would probably not have relished, a good way to see how wrong he was is to read the volume of essays which Messrs Lipsey and Leonard have dedicated to his memory. Not, it must be admitted, that they themselves concede anything of the sort. On the contrary, they have managed to turn their mentor ...”

“... from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after ...”

“... loses sight of man himself. On the evidence of this book, as of his best recent films, we can now read ‘and Françcois Truffaut’ in that sentence alongside ‘Jean ...”

“... of that famous list of Communist sympathisers Orwell was compiling in his last years. He has read many letters not previously accessible – for example, a great many to Orwell’s agent Leonard Moore – which make it even clearer than it already was that the writer and Victor Gollancz didn’t get on, though not ...”

“... I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza ...”

“... them, as she puts it with characteristic vagueness, or because, more mundanely, they have time to read several newspapers and thus to assimilate all points of view. Touchingly, the inveterate reformer suggests that the confinement of the sick helps to restore their faith in human progress – the gradual ‘amelioration’ of things being much more visible to ...”

“... down on his orders.Harry Freedman​ has written varied books about Jewish history and culture: on Leonard Cohen’s spiritual sources; the Talmud; the Kabbalah; Britain’s Jews. In Shylock’s Venice, he has taken a broad brush to the history of Venice’s Jews, producing a book of lightly informative anecdotes about various residents of the ghetto, or ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.’ It’s a way of being both alive and dead within a single sentence.In the early 1970s Johnson did an MFA at the University of Iowa and came under the influence of Raymond Carver, who had yet to receive his late acclaim and was still in full-blown ...”

“... to this much less damaging daytime jaunt. When I look up cute hoor, I’m directed to hoor and read as follows: HE version of ‘whore’ hore. The pronunciation/hu[e]r/ was common in England in the 16th and 17th centuries and lasted into the 19th century. Hiberno-English retains this older pronunciation, while the meaning has become extended from ...”

“... on the scene at the last minute, hot, tired, ill or drunk (sometimes all of these together), read out their piece and depart. Some wanker called ‘Caserly’ (that just has to be a false name, probably someone on the editorial staff) has written an open letter to the (Western Evening) Herald saying how arrogant and ‘out of touch’ (yeah) I am, will ...”

“... There was no question of a love match. Nevertheless, Florence must have found it painful to read the extraordinary poems Hardy was writing in memory of Emma. Her letters soon begin to cloud with dejection. Like Emma, she was to be childless. Lacking Emma’s spiky feminism – she believed that women were ‘only strong when they realise their weakness ...”

“... she lost the baby, but still wanted Lane to marry her. The hero of marriages is the yeoman Leonard Wheatcroft, who pursued Elizabeth Hawley (‘very fortunate, besides beautiful’) for two years – it took a year of love-letters and months of hand-holding to get Elizabeth’s consent, men weeks of haggling with her father to get his. Arrangements ...”