“... by Charmian and her pliant doctors. Stone’s Sailor on Horseback remains both readable and widely read. But as a biography it is flawed. There is not a shred of annotation attached to the text. Stone cannibalised whole chunks of Martin Eden (London’s ‘artistic memoirs’) and John Barleycorn (his ‘alcoholic memoirs’) as biographical narrative without ...”

“... that it is difficult indeed to avoid excoriating him in the strongest of terms. It is hard to read these remarks by the heads of the two main Western governments which had been fighting in Korea for three years as suggesting anything other than that they thought supporting Rhee had been rather a mistake. But was Rhee himself the problem? Was it his ...”

“... These​ two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity ...”

“... retirement from sleuthing to pursue his interest in alcohol. (Fans recommend playing a game as you read: to try to match him drink for drink. This would be dangerous.) Nick’s wife, Nora, who never knew him in his detecting days, persuades him to take on a final case: there’s a family connection and she rather likes the excitement. She’s surprised at his ...”

“... which maintains its connection to its own traditions by running the odd piece you might care to read, has a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s essays to give away with the current number. It still has some ‘Sexy but Deadly’ micro-celeb on the cover, but inside, the anxieties I’ve been talking about are more humanly displayed. Henry Sutton writes about being ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily concerned with regime-level ...”

“... of tequila and cocaine. From institutionalised prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come ...”

“... visual arts, to such an extent that of Nero’s last words, ‘What an artist dies in me,’ we read that he ‘could fairly describe himself as “artifex” because he practised painting and sculpture’, whereas in fact it certainly referred – whether or not Nero actually said it – to his notorious public perfomances as a musician. Literature, even ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... the 1980s by a touch of incestuous and homo-erotic feeling. Writing in the New Republic in 1979, Richard Hall faulted the five-volume biography for manifesting ‘a peculiar timidity at the centre of the work’. What was missing from Edel’s account, according to Hall, was not so much James’s ‘homo-erotic bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in ...”

“... acute and literate observers of the American past and present, and this volume is a delightful read, often very funny, sharply thoughtful and analytical, always telling: it will have a deservedly large success. (I hope, though, that Wills changes his publishers. I wouldn’t stay with someone who fulfils a classic author’s nightmare by getting his name ...”

“... distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?’ The old philosophers thought not, but Richard Gregory and subsequent workers have told more complex stories about recovery from blindness. We do not need philosophers to become engrossed. The one non-spiritual goal of Christ’s ministry was the curing of blindness, and every evangelist describes ...”

“... new dispensation? Cannadine’s assumption that one can re-create the wider general audience that read G.M. Trevelyan or the old Pelican History simply by trying harder is reminiscent of Norman Tebbit on the unemployed or Mrs Shephard on state education – wishful thinking (and ahistorical). Revealingly, the old Pelican series, which Cannadine himself ...”