“... and, to cap and threaten it all, the War. Some of these, it must be said, are more rewarding to read than others. The best letters, as a rule, are those in which the correspondents are at a distance and not planning to meet soon: then what is to be said can’t be postponed till a tête-à-tête. When James had read Mrs ...”

“... not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its effect on Coleridge. He atones for it ...”

“... to play their parts properly. The essays which make up this short book are unpretentious, well-read and illuminating. One particularly attractive feature is the way Blakemore demonstrates the consistency between Burke’s political writings narrowly considered and the concerns of his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He ...”

“... ever believe a word we wrote. I cannot count the number of letters I get from people who have read my column in the Mirror and say, ‘We simply couldn’t believe your article about X and wonder if you could tell us whether he is suing you’ –or something of the sort. When I worked for Private Eye, this reaction was even more common. Private Eye, one ...”

“... only recently available), should Worthen’s book strike one as an exhausting slog to read? Of course it is a long book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but ...”

“... making better money than they would back home in Kerala, or Baluchistan, so that’s OK. He has read – and cites in his notes – the Human Rights Watch 2006 report Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates, but notwithstanding his admission that Dubai is ‘all dark side’ he remains ...”

“... black sweaters and tight jeans, watching the furious activity and dialogue, and then went home to read Being and Nothingness (or perhaps just its popularisation in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider). And maybe, later on, it was Marlowe and Spade who gave us the courage and foolheadedness to take to the streets. We were young and had energy to expend, so movies ...”

“... of a sexually explicit diary delivered to the Court while the trial was underway. Carman: Can you read that sentence? Allan: It says his wife has a weak . . . I can’t read that word. I think it says ‘heart’. Carman: Are you sure it begins with an H? Allan: It’s not the word you think it is. Judge: What word ...”

“... where distinctions between hand and machine are difficult to recover. In different ways, Warhol, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke produce a related conundrum of the painterly and the photographic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art at its best.Lichtenstein’s work abounds in manually made signs of mechanically ...”

“... Other, less basic venues soon sprang up. In Charlotte Street, the prosperous Communard Victor Richard opened a grocery which became a centre of advice and help for arriving refugees – and a haunt for police spies. A few doors along, Elisabeth Audinet – a militant in the radical socialist Blanquist faction – ran a restaurant. These places resounded ...”

“... In a recent article in the Observer, he describes how, with 3188 pages of text set and proof-read, he began to feel sharp chest and stomach pains. ‘My wife was certain that I was spending too many hours crouched over my desk.’ A few weeks later, Davison had to have a sextuple heart by-pass, after which he felt that he was ‘living on borrowed ...”

“... literary calling float through the novel like a set of spectral teases. It’s a bit like seeing Richard Burton use the technique he learnt for Henry V to play some Alistair Maclean paratrooper. Intermittently, the nonsense assumes a human shape and pressure, the dialogue, when it is not too blatantly James versus James, sounds like something a human being ...”

“... including the editors. Five years ago they edited another collection, since widely-read: The Thatcher Effect, published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life ...”

“... without mercy to be punished to the example of all other. MacCulloch knows that this can be read as a ‘craven piece of toadying’, but he insists that it be read quite otherwise, as ‘a model of pastoral wisdom and courage’. Likewise with Cranmer’s letter on Cromwell’s fall. MacCulloch recognises how ...”

“... had been one of the dreariest museums in London – a tourist guidebook at the time apparently read simply: ‘National Portrait Gallery. No lavatories’ – from a place where you would only be seen dead (literally: it was not until Strong’s directorship that the Gallery started to collect portraits of the living) into a fashionable place to see and be ...”