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“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”

“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just ...”

“... out to have the text of Porno inside. The most recent Welsh novel, The Blade Artist (2016), stars Frank Begbie, the psycho from Trainspotting, giving him a different set of outcomes from those in T2. In The Blade Artist Begbie has discovered the artist within himself in prison, married his therapist and moved to California, where he works as a sought-after ...”

“... of his time. In a postscript the judge recommends the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Question 1 is: ‘If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, would you have written such a story?’ Question 6 is: ‘What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than ...”

“... interpretation. Bloom, as I said, calls himself an experiential critic. He wants to do what Samuel Johnson did so well in the Lives of the Poets, which is to record his own experience of literature in immediate and fairly personal terms, unconstrained by a lot of fancy theorising. His readings succeed in casting brilliant light on classic works that are much ...”

“... but these are really survival memoirs. A Child Called ‘It’ by Dave Pelzer, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans initiated the genre in the 1990s. They were largely read for sentimental and/or sadomasochistic reasons, for their account of hardship overcome, regardless of their literary merit (Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work ...”

“... as a senatorial candidate in California, though he evidently changed his mind when Senator Hiram Johnson died during the summer of 1945. At the height of the 1946 election season (which ended with the Republicans regaining control of Congress for the first time in 14 years), Welles was in Acapulco, making The Lady from Shanghai with Rita Hayworth. Although ...”

“... But for Trilling the mix seems exactly right. The famed grace and wit come across, but so does a frank recognition of the defences and swerves forced on metropolitan intellectuals by events. Trilling’s story is told by other New Yorkers, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who between them seem to muster a greater range of ...”

“... and car crashes, he finally made it to AP’s Washington Bureau in the summer of 1965. Lyndon Johnson had just stage-managed the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a congressional carte blanche that would dramatically widen the US war in Vietnam. Hersh, soon the senior AP man in Washington, was quickly introduced to the mendacity at the heart of the war. In ...”

“... III by Joseph Pringle, the President of the Royal Society, and had become an acquaintance of Dr Johnson and a welcome member of his club. Banks liberally applied his wealth to assembling at his London house a parlour society of gentlemen amateurs, natural philosophers, foreign visitors and artists. Meanwhile, the much-heralded collection of foreign plant ...”

“... synthesis of naked commerce and organic architecture’ as foreseen by Louis Sullivan, mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright. The basic unit of the skyscraper is the ‘cell’: ‘We take our cue from the individual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all ...”

“... includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a ...”