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“... Of all the now vanished breed of New Yorker humorists – James Thurber, E.B. White, Dorothy Parker – S.J. Perelman wrote by far the richest, most meticulously crafted prose. His dedication to his art was almost frightening. He was once asked in an interview how many drafts each piece went through. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he replied ...”

“... bourgeois, a Wilcox rather than a Schlegel or even a Leonard Bast. Or so it can easily seem. James Gindin, however, seeing the case in quite another light, challengingly subtitles his biography ‘An Alien’s Fortress’ and suggests at the outset that, despite appearances, Galsworthy had his full share of the discontent and the divided mind needed to ...”

“... women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had started life as ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to ...”

“... World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by trustees and college presidents. With some associates at the New Republic, Beard and Robinson hatched plans for a ‘new’ school. ‘New’ was in the air. The New Republic had been founded just ...”

“... poet of the Victorian age into something of a period joke. Under the guise of rehabilitation Harold Nicolson’s biography threw a few more spadesful of earth on his grave, taking it for granted that interest in him would probably never be revived. How wrong Nicolson was is indicated by the flood of criticism and biography during the succeeding ...”

“... to become his brother-in-law. On the way they were joined by a raffish Wykhamist by the name of James Clay, a friend of Disraeli’s brother, and also by Tita Falcieri, who had formerly been a servant to Byron. Indeed, though Lord Blake does not quite write of it in these terms, much of the tour might almost be considered a Byronic pilgrimage of a kind. Not ...”

“... and elision that have always been the main concern of adapters suddenly seem out-dated. Harold Pinter’s reduction of Remembrance of Things Past to 163 sparsely covered pages, however brilliant, is a thing of the past itself. The only serious approach is to take the necessary time. That is the effect Brideshead should have had on television: the ...”

“... on conquest.’ I believed, and still believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... may hear ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native woodnotes wild’. Whatever Harold Bloomian Oedipal reasons one may impute for Milton’s decision to turn his towering literary precursor into an untaught rustic infant, somewhere between Pan and Puck, ‘L’Allegro’ established a tradition characterised by the invention of fanciful ...”

“... The off-chart mathematician Noam Himmel opens her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. William James and his sister Alice feature in The Dark Sister (1991), a book Iris Murdoch called ‘brilliantly ingenious, beautifully written and thoroughly alarming’. More recently, the physicist Samuel Mallach appears in Properties of Light (2000); Gödel and ...”

“... and he was satisfied’ is how she describes a man with a prostitute. But readers admired the King James cadences: this was what great literature was supposed to sound like. Spurling, like some of Buck’s other biographers, charitably suggests that she first thought through her books in Chinese, translating as she went along; what sounds biblical is actually ...”

“... has long been a favourite subject for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book follows works by Harold Lamb, Hilda Hookham and John Ure. History writing at this level seeks to provide us with vivid pictures of how things must have been and even, at times, to allow us to enter the minds of the protagonists. Marozzi opens with an account of Tamerlane on the ...”

“... the use of parody in this book was also, for me, a way of coping with what the American critic Harold Bloom has called the ‘anxiety of influence’: the sense every young writer must have of the daunting weight of the literary tradition he has inherited, the necessity and yet seeming impossibility of doing something in writing that has not been done ...”