“... Zawahiri and his group immediately. It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian ...”

“... years. Swinburne is devoted to him at the start, as is Siegfried Sassoon at the close, and Henry James is going to address over four hundred letters to him. He weathers two major storms, one emotional and the other resulting from a rash claim that if not a poet he is at least a scholar. Becoming Librarian of the House of Lords, he luxuriates acceptably amid ...”

“... society. ‘It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.’ This, from Henry James, is one of Ozick’s favourite quotations. In her case, it is literally true, since the history of the persecution of the Jews in Europe bears down with a terrible weight on nearly everything she has written. She has approached the Holocaust head-on only ...”

“... Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were ...”

“... which in its turn provokes the repudiation and alienation found, characteristically, in D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical sketch: ‘One can belong absolutely to no class.’ All classes are prisons. But it may give cachet to have belonged to one, to the working class especially, as it does to have been at a war, or in a real prison. It is commonplace ...”

“... the author: overly rhapsodic descriptions of sex, in particular, tend to cause feelings of unease (Lawrence, Mailer). The other, subtler way is through the failure to show sex as a function of character: to depict sex in fiction as a holiday from personality is to make sex, in fictional terms, merely digressive. One of the triumphs of The Swimming-Pool Library ...”

“... elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want’. T.E. Lawrence, who had helped to muster the Arab tribes for Allenby’s war in Syria, wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘We have killed ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely ...”

“... that the sidebar on Bloomsbury neglects to mention that it was the Hogarth Press that sponsored James Strachey’s translation of Freud, beginning in 1924. Gertrude Stein receives her own sidebar, only to be marginalised as a collector of Picassos, with no mention of her own groundbreaking experiments in literary genre and poetics. The most serious ...”

“... of the hero’s finger. A historical novel set in pre-Revolutionary France, it shares with Lawrence Norfolk’s recent Lemprière’s Dictionary the knowledge of some hitherto unsuspected developments in 18th-century robotics. In Paul Micou’s Rotten Times the main character suffers from a hyperactive access of memory, known as Tourraine’s ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in ...”

“... heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If ...”

“... the plot during a restless night in Tokyo, when he was visited by a shimmering vision of Gertrude Lawrence). Four days to write a classic comedy was good going, but he had already written Hay Fever in three. In 1941, when hard up, he withdrew to the Italianate folly of Portmeirion in Wales (presumably festooned in barbed wire) and knocked out Blithe Spirit in ...”

“... music over the title, followed by a clip from the beginning of Hitchcock’s Vertigo – James Stewart climbing onto the roof from which his colleague is about to fall to his death. De Palma’s voice says: ‘I saw Vertigo in 1958. I saw it at Radio City Music Hall. I will never forget it.’ As he speaks the last sentence his image appears on ...”

“... that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 until his death at 58 he lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Switzerland and France, but his creative attention remained focused on the Dublin he grew up in. Though he spoke ...”

“... to repeal the exclusion laws. Germaine Greer duly became the first woman elected, playing Gertrude Lawrence in a Noel-Gertie colloquy featuring the present writer as Noel. (As you might imagine, she stood out from the cast.) Before that, such an inventive woman as Eleanor Bron had to be content with guest status. The lads weren’t going to give up their boas ...”