“... of illness. She grew up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grandfather owned a department store (Robert Kanigel describes him as ‘a force in the local Jewish community and a major philanthropist’). Her mother thought the Californian climate would help Marian recover from Spanish flu – and also wanted to enrol at the university herself. Marian’s ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on inaccuracies perpetrated by career biographers, manipulations that nudge her out of the official portraits. Biography is serious business these days. It underwrites the republication of a ...”

“... it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in a self-directed imperative, a form not uncommon in poetry – to ‘buckle’ those psychically assimilated qualities to his own ‘stirred’ heart, alchemising them into the subjective world of feeling, and thereby generating the imagination that renders them ...”

“... that it reminds us, in the face of much contrary temptation, not to underestimate Amis’s knowing self-awareness about himself and his writing. Or, putting it more briefly (as he did in recording, for Larkin’s delight, his response to an unimpressive poem by John Wain): ‘Could of told you that, shitface.’ Amis was not born into the literary purple, as ...”

“... too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure polemic intention; it is decidedly self-possessed.’ Something of the poems’ self-possession would have come from the man who wrote them. ‘Polemic intention’, too, perhaps – for Oppen was soon in the thick of Depression politics and the writing had come ...”

“... general, waste good material on his correspondents. He was, he wrote to the Hungarian film-maker Robert Lazlo, ‘a bad letter-writer’. His replies were terse, polite and to the point. ‘I wish I could write you as interesting letters as you write to me, but nothing goes on outside my window except blue sea and mountains,’ he wrote to Skvorecky. His ...”

“... Something was supposed to stick, and stick it did thanks to the assiduous repetitions of Captain Robert Maxwell and his ‘Labour paper’. But the actual money, as Milne shows, cannot have and did not come from Libya. And the timing of its deployment and discovery was so exquisitely calibrated as to require the intervention of someone with knowledge gained ...”

“... from him. The sad thing is that in real life Mr Carter is a literary journalist of some repute. As Robert Haupt’s successor to the editorship of the Age Monthly Review, he inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon ...”

“... the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re ...”

“... some of Professor Mitchison’s material on shortage of food in Scotland in the 1690s. It is not a self-evidently absurd hypothesis that the wave of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe marks the Continent’s narrow avoidance of a major Malthusian crisis, and it seems to be true that witchcraft prosecutions accompany a rapid rise in population, and that cases ...”

“... of a taxi by David Frost during the expensive year when he functioned as the club’s secretary.) Robert Helpmann choreographed all the Footlights revues in the late Thirties. Things picked up under his regime to the extent that the chorus line, instead of being Dadie Rylands protégés dolled up in point shoes and tutus, were rugby-players dolled up in point ...”

“... gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for only a small part of their education. That the Queen ‘hardly reads at ...”

“... fields. Most of these responses have developed or refined Said’s framework in some way. Not so Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Irwin’s central point is that before there was Orientalism, there was Orientalism: the scholarly study of languages and texts pertaining to the Orient. The book operates on two levels. In ...”

“... to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate ...”