“... people believed in the empire as a force for good in the world.’As the Birkbeck historian Frank Trentmann recently pointed out in his excellent analysis of Life in the United Kingdom, more recent history is similarly distorted by the 2013 document. Cutting out all reference to the appeasement pursued by British governments in the 1930s, the narrative ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... several unpublished novels: the incomplete ‘Who Else Is Rank?’, written in 1944-45 with E. Frank Coles, a fellow officer in the Army Signals Corps; ‘The Legacy’, written in 1948-49, and ‘rejected by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties ...”

“... book – ‘a joyous interpretation’ – in the Daily Telegraph. In the Sunday Telegraph Paul Johnson asked the ‘why, oh why’ question: why another life of Lear? He seemed stumped for an answer. Levi says his book springs in part from an under-researched lecture on Lear he gave as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Lear did not, as many suppose, invent ...”

“... emphasis.Karl’s verbal snapshots, I soon and lastingly learned, were a wonder of the world. R.W. Johnson was in those days writing a series of super-forthright, abrasive pieces that often featured glancing dismissals of all sorts of senior Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in ...”

“... New York – contrary to popular opinion and Frank Sinatra – is never a city that doesn’t sleep. It sleeps soundly in fact. You walk the streets on certain nights and suddenly you can feel quite alone under the buildings. It’s not that the place is deserted, there are things going on – taxi-cabs, homeless people, late-night walkers, the police – but they can seem to proceed at that hour like things out of step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin ...”

“... however, inaugurating the fifth party system, whose divisions were further exacerbated by Lyndon Johnson’s social reforms in the 1960s and by the Reaganite counter-revolution which followed in the 1980s. Americans now find themselves in the middle of a further realignment which has put paid not only to the post-New Deal system, but also to an entrenched ...”

“... Hunt his house when it appeared she might figure in divorce proceedings. His explanation was quite frank: it was a matter of her ‘position’, and by implication of his. I really don’t see how an old friend of yours could feel or pronounce your being in a position to permit of this [public scandal] anything but ‘lamentable’, lamentable – oh ...”

“... highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the second by Cesar Pelli in 1984, the third by Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004, and the latest by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a vanguard New York studio, in co-operation with Gensler, a global design firm.* Thus in ninety years MoMA has grown from ...”

“... of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware ...”

“... of the old type of literary journalist, those who numbered among them Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Smollett, Hazlitt, Pritchett’, and that everything was turning against him. The critics and reviewers now making their reputations ‘were men like Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks, who were academics ...”

“... to Wolfe. He, at least, knows what he’s on about. As the Eighties advance, he is more and more frank about his convictions. These are: that the United States was stabbed in the back over Vietnam (‘The Truest Sport’); that welfare deliberately encouraged ghetto insurrection (‘Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers’); that élitist designers are responsible ...”

“... including not only Lubitsch, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but also Robert, Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray. Characteristically, his best remarks about them home in on technique. ‘Hitchcock’s mastery of the are grows greater with each film and he constantly needs to invent new difficulties for himself. He has become the ...”

“... and philistinism. The fact that the PEN/Faulkner awards panel included the novelist Charles Johnson, Guterson’s writing instructor – who also provided a puff for the book – did not seem to arouse any concern, but then the chances of finding a judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in ...”

“... practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of international big money prizes, lectures and juries from the 1960s onwards, is a very contemporary tale of celebrity and image, fame and fallibility. His ...”