“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... it is fair to say that Hillary Clinton’s relationship to her husband reminds people of Robert Kennedy’s relationship to his brother: trusted adviser, companion, friend. It is striking that Hillary Clinton’s up-front influence is so threatening to an electorate which has had to face up to the realities of a Reagan Administration held hostage to ...”

“... great himself. And why not? Shouldn’t the person being toasted be allowed to express her ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one ...”

“... of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have both, eventually (perhaps ‘the universe is not yet spiritually ...”

“... I had lunch with a writer friend of my foster mother, along with five or six visiting Russians and Robert Graves. Graves of the halo of curly white hair, not at all good looking, fat and pasty, in his late sixties or early seventies. I sat at the table opposite him in awed silence, gazing, longing for him to speak to me, not daring to say anything for fear ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... often used here, one borrowed from recent work on Nietzschean philosophy, especially that of Robert Pippin. ‘In fashioning our arguments and forming intentions from these commitments,’ Hawthorn writes, summarising Pippin’s summary of Nietzsche, ‘we more often than not embellish, qualify or transmute them and so hide them from ourselves and each ...”

“... Thus were the British defeated. However, while the tiger is undoubtedly emblematic of Tipu, the self-styled Tiger of Mysore, and his fierce resistance to European colonialism, there is no evidence he had a particular European in mind. He may well have heard about the death of Munro – two of his sons were being held hostage by the British in Calcutta at ...”

“... thought. There are some fascinating hints of this, in references to his admiration for Sir Robert Peel, his fondness for cautious, piecemeal change, his lack of reverence for history (combined with an element of pious nostalgia for his father’s heyday in the late 19th century). Above all, there is his utter remoteness from the socio-sacramental ...”

“... was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and ...”

“... that Dan Carden, once a Corbynite Green New Dealer, now convenes the Blue Labour Group and writes self-flagellating articles calling for a wave of reindustrialisation through rearmament. The remainder of the party’s left that has not been expelled or gagged implores its leaders to take on vested interests and raise taxes on the rich. All agree on the need ...”

“... sets out six specimens equidistant in a row. Each is a fragment, but each has the quality of self-possession characteristic of McEwen. From left to right they are a broken bud, a small leaf lightly withered, a larger leaf also withered, a piece of bark, three seed pods, a torn branch and a sycamore seed with one wing missing. Writing about another series ...”

“... under floorboards or digging them into the earth, of concealing the colour of your hair (self-Aryanisation by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream ...”