“... There are chat-shows, of course, and autobiographies (often complementary) to set the record straight, but these are poor substitutes. Is real life that important anyway? Both these books sport impressive supporting casts, which run into the glittering hundreds. Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The ...”

“... gay directors who won’t show much interest in you,’ he told me (he was broadly right) ‘and straight directors who will try to sleep with you’ (he was broadly right). Despite the inappropriateness of the comment, and the hilarious/depressing omission of the idea that a director could be female, it was useful to me to see the inevitability of the ...”

“... This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel: bik (Yiddish: bull) – doorman latke (Yiddish: potato cake) – 1. police cap 2. policeman noz (Yiddish: nose) – policeman shammes (Yiddish: assistant to rabbi, beadle) – policeman sholem (Yiddish: peace) – gun shoyfer (Yiddish: horn) – cell phone shtarker (Yiddish: strong man, strong arm) – gangster; hard man Yiddish, it turns out, has not said its last word: it is still involved in the business of coinages and slippages ...”

“... that it’s someone for whom the whole issue of courage is not straightforward. ‘I am a pretty straight kind of guy’ – there’s another one. Who would say that? All memoirs wrestle with this issue, and political memoirs are no exception, not least because so many of them are at heart exercises in self-justification. Writers, actors, sportsmen and ...”

“... would be that she is reporting some years after the events while certain of her colleagues went straight out from the Cabinet Room and fed the press. Cabinet secrecy is not, indeed, so well preserved that one needs to condemn overt leaking long after the event. I cannot think of anyone who really suffers from it. True, now it has been done, it will ...”

“... after the league shut down in March. Fans and players retreated to their homes and watched Michael Jordan instead. The basketball podcasts I listen to paused their endless speculation about the shutdown and the possible resumption of play (later that summer, the league finished the season in a bubble at Disney World in Florida) and gave in to nostalgia ...”

“... of what he once called ‘evening’s empire’, and in his capacity to make it simple, to say it straight. He knows that love can come. He can renew. ‘Hamlet is a name,’ wrote William Hazlitt in 1817, ‘his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality ...”

“... more – this is a very broad generalisation and counter-examples could be adduced – towards straight imposts on foodstuffs, including bread. The point is simple: whether or not the well-to-do mercantile folk were really prospering more – and this is debatable – they clearly have fewer inhibitions about displaying prosperity and differentiating ...”

“... were hardly surprising in communities where the blood and unwanted body parts of animals flowed straight out of butcher shops and leather tanners, where the castration of livestock was a common occurrence, and where hogs, above all, served many purposes – culinary and linguistic. When a farmer paid for a military replacement he ‘bought a pig’ (cochon ...”

“... with the implication that, yes it can, and hey, what about this one; while elsewhere, no doubt straight-ahead action-loving male readers may have been on board with James Earl Ray, but they were miffed to find so much Antonio Muñoz Molina. Both objections seemed plausible to me; they might even have been calculated to appeal to me as a reader. I don’t ...”

“... the Germans somewhere in occupied Europe. But where? The tip of the Tunisian peninsula pointed straight at Sicily, only a hundred miles distant, and the island was an obvious base for British and American bombers to launch attacks on mainland Italy. In Churchill’s words, ‘Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.’ The Germans were no ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... tell the truth. And telling the truth is not just telling lies about your enemies: it is talking straight to your friends. It means the avoidance of bad faith ... The Gramscian intellectual, facing a moral dilemma over truth-telling within a political organisation, will feel that the cause and the organisation must always come first. But the Orwellian will ...”

“... When 19-year-old Rider Haggard, an underachiever straight from the crammer, secured his first job in 1875, his mother addressed an earnest poem to him. He had now finished drifting ‘adown Life’s vernal tide’ and faced a stiffer challenge. ‘Rise to thy destiny!’ she exhorted. ‘Awake thy powers!’ His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer ...”

“... the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid ...”