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“... makes Léa give Chéri up for a biologically-appropriate wife. ‘Men,’ man-in-the-news Iron John Bly reports, ‘are more lonesome in every generation.’ In the last few days, as I’ve been getting more and more inflamed in my thoughts about the human (i.e. female, i.e. menopausal) condition, I’ve been hearing a lot about how hard it is being a man ...”

“... editorial office was one small book-and-paper-suffocated room, with four of us in it: Karl, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Susannah Clapp and me. Even that staffing level sounds more lavish than it was, because Karl split his time with his other job as Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, about a ten-minute walk away. This was ...”

“... The LRB became a paper in its own right in May 1980, when the first independent issue appeared. (John Lanchester will write about Karl and the LRB in the next issue.) For all its genius Karl’s Listener was still a conventional London weekly, though affiliated to the BBC, rather than a political entity of one sort or another. The LRB is more sedate (no ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem ...”

“... never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by ...”

“... 1945 he only saw his wife Mamie once briefly and then rather spoilt the effect by calling her ‘Kay’ after his Irish driver and assistant Kay Summersby of whom she was already madly jealous. Ambrose has carefully investigated the widely believed story that at the end of the war Eisenhower wrote to Marshall asking ...”

“... including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the Thirties with President Roosevelt, who, more than any President before him, manipulated the newspapers and the new possibilities of radio (which President Hoover seldom used), the book is ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... who monitored the baths and assigned sleeping places, and the young and depraved pauper ‘Kay’ – even found themselves propelled onto the music hall stage or living a ghostly afterlife in fiction and verse. Traces of Greenwood’s prose and characters can still be heard in Orwell’s ‘down and out’ accounts, written more than fifty years ...”

“... In a long tape-recorded conversation she had with Kay Dick in November 1970 (the best source for the flavour of her speech), Stevie Smith remarked: I’m straightforward but I’m not simple ... In some ways I’m romantic but my basic root is profoundly sensible – profoundly sensible. About everything. There is a balance; I am aware of a balance ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”

“... substantial minority under 18th-century mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... short by the Greek Civil War, she came back to London and more of the same, except that now rich John Sutro was her principal beau, with Connolly in hot pursuit. Predictably what clinched it for Connolly was a holiday she spent in Geneva with Sutro. The wedding took place, ‘after a year’s talk of marriage’, on 5 October 1950. They quarrelled on their ...”

“... gang of vicious and often drunken thugs, murderers and fornicators’) to the novels of John Updike. In the old days – stretching from the 12th century to the Second World War – there was marriage and there was adultery (or thoughts of adultery): on the one hand, stability, a house and a dowry; on the other, longing, desire and despair. This ...”