“... with ‘Berryman’, and deconstructing ‘memoirs’ as ‘me-moirs’. As long as reading the book lasts, it is unnecessary to worry abut modernism, crisis, decline and fall, apocalypse, the death of God, or of the Author. But the serious parts of the book are balanced upon sentiments I think Enright cares about – the desire to attend to the ...”

“... harpy of ‘Bang bang, you’re dead’; the jobs at the Foreign Office, at the Poetry Society, at Peter Owen, that became the jobs written about in Loitering with Intent, A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) and no doubt others. But it skates over many things about which eager beavers may want to know more: Muriel Camberg’s disastrous teenage marriage to Sydney ...”

“... also left him with a bee in his bonnet about comic books. His younger patients, he observed, liked reading comics, and as far as he could see the medium was a poisonous jumble of will- to-power fantasies, sexualised violence, misogyny, racism and deviant sexuality. He wasn’t the first to take aim at ‘the marijuana of the nursery’, as a columnist for the ...”

“... work resonated with sympathetic policymakers. He and his associates, such as Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, had particularly intimate connections with the Wilson governments of the 1960s, but their reach was not confined to Britain. They were consulted by more than one broadly progressive foreign government. Much of the social policy of Mauritius and ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for ...”

“... with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep.’ I kept reading: how could I not? All that dancing consonance! That deft alliteration! Then came a sentence to choke on, for political, not aesthetic reasons: ‘I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands … in an idle ...”

“... five-year intervals. It is likely that few but devoted fans could cite them from memory. I am reading from the list at the back of Daugherty’s book: Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994) and Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (2000). Unlike Catch-22, the later books all deliver a rich dose of the flavour of ...”

“... a longer period if it was ‘within a defined timescale’. This, I reflect, is the best holiday reading, and it flows from the risks Trimble took in signing the Agreement. He then failed to sell it, just as he failed to modernise his party and failed to create a real sense of civil consensus, but this was due to the inadequacy of his party, starved of ...”

“... makes readers consider not only a writer’s achievements, but his development. The pleasure in reading the first hundred pages or so of Williams’s lies in watching his style slowly come into being. Because there is so much apprentice work, and because his style finally made such a break with the past, it can be almost unnerving to track the transition ...”

“... there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life. Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a ...”

“... to what distinguished each of them. As Brown admits, some of this made for dry and disappointing reading (‘Science as a Vocation’ is ‘one long depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions’). But what she finds most valuable in Weber’s ethos, not least in its implications both for the ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed ...”

“... later career. Nonetheless, the story he tells so skilfully is susceptible to more than one reading. Jenkins’s social trajectory has sometimes been represented as a classic rags-to-riches story, but the reality was more complex (to his credit, Jenkins himself rarely attempted to play the proletarian card). It is true that his father began his working ...”

“... never happened, though he undermines his case somewhat by saying it wouldn’t have been like him. Reading Kavanagh, I was often reminded of biographies of Alexander the Great: there are the same disagreements over what actually happened, despite numerous eyewitnesses, and the same attempts on the part of his fans to put the most positive spin on the most ...”