“... dead people I got to show this book to: one was Richard Hamilton who died this week; the other was William Burroughs was died earlier on. William Burroughs was very generous in a terrifying kind of way. He said it’s okay, and why wasn’t it science fiction? I had a very tough day with him. Very ...”

“... points out that in his version of Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics, William Weaver translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you want the book in ...”

“... and Cliff Richard. ‘Here they come,’ the BBC said. ‘Oh, they look a bit awkward,’ said James Whitaker, Royal Expert. ‘Oh well. Never mind. She’s finally got him in her grip.’ ‘I don’t think I am wallowing in exuberant excitement,’ said Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. ‘I think there will be a sigh of relief among the ...”

“... Sound and the Fury for the sheer pleasure of yet another reading. None of this is to propose that William Faulkner was a non-writer. He was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real genius. He is keenly observant, and when he so wishes can be stereoscopically graphic. He gives us the intimate feel of an old banker’s run-down bank ...”

“... Marchamont Nedham at their head. In 1656 it yielded Nedham’s The Excellency of a Free State and James Harrington’s Oceana. The leading works produced by the second period were Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government. Collectively, these writers are normally described as ‘republicans’. Skinner ...”

“... for such an unlikely administration. For the position of chief science adviser, Thiel suggested William Happer, America’s most prominent climate sceptic and a man who had compared the demonisation of fossil fuels to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Trump eventually fobbed off Happer with a lowlier position, and even that proved too much: Happer left the ...”

“... fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or Romantic than realist. They ...”

“... to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and ...”

“... to detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided ...”

“... which toured Europe during 1958-59. Nelson Rockefeller bought a painting, as did the playwright William Inge. Life magazine called her ‘the most celebrated of the young American women painters’. Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1957) That ...”

“... from his predecessor, found some constructive work for it to do. For the Think Tank members, James Callaghan emerges as the premier for whom it was easiest to work because he never pretended to know all the answers, and positively welcomed a variety of advice. A similiar attitude had been essential to the success of Lloyd George’s secretariat. His ...”

“... to believe that a man could write one way and act another. The end of the line came, perhaps, with William Matthew’s well-written and wittily-titled book of 1966, The Ill-Framed Knight, which argued that the author of Morte Darthur, like his hero Lancelot, was a chevalier mal fet, an ‘illframed knight’ who had been ‘framed’ in the modern sense: the ...”

“... all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and patronage ...”

“... Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory came to collect folklore in the West of Ireland, her future husband William had been busy drafting the notorious Gregory clause in the depths of the Great Famine, which deprived thousands of relief-seeking small farmers of their paltry piece of land and was no doubt responsible for a fair number of unnecessary deaths. Steadily ...”

“... revelations, they reinforce the impression – already given in biographies by R.P. Eckert and William Cooke – of a character of great complexity. Thomas, the eldest of six boys, was born in Lambeth 107 years ago, and was brought up to feel ‘proud of thinking that both Father and Mother came from Wales.’ The remark implies displacement as well as ...”