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“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or leave. There isn’t much ...”

“... Two days filming my TV parables programme Heavenly Stories at Dulwich College, the setting the Masters’ Library, a galleried, High Victorian room adjoining the school hall, presumably where the masters foregather before assembly. Over the chimneypiece are two crude allegorical panels of Piety and Liberality, the ideals ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... With the leading post-war Tory thinker in politics thus consigned to the scrapheap, Chris Patten, William Waldegrave and Francis Pym inevitably go the same way. These omissions might have been ascribed to a bizarre decision by Honderich to disallow books by all practising politicians, were it not that he does include Roy Hattersley and Gordon Brown. Much the ...”

“... to be detected on other planets are single-celled microbes. These are beginning to look like the masters of creation. Stephen Jay Gould points out that the first two billion years of life on Earth was the age of bacteria, and nothing much has changed since. Taxonomists used to think of evolution as a ladder, from microbes to us, and then as a tree, with ...”

“... It has been an influential cult novel: the Beats imitated its breathless style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (1963) is clearly based on the tub-thumping final chapter. It was turned down by Hollywood studios 17 times, on the grounds that it was ‘too depressing’; Buñuel was set to direct it in 1965 but the funding collapsed. When Trumbo himself ...”

“... moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like Shaftesbury and his followers, were audible but ...”

“... essays. Out of the window – if these experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel ...”

“... we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is thin-haired, large-headed, and chubby-limbed. His ear has the nick in the cheek so rarely absent ...”

“... is perfect, showing, in Angelica Goodden’s words, ‘a warm and seductive romanticism’. Mrs William Chinnery is, by comparison, a little bland. Vigée Le Brun was at her best with romantic young girls and attractive men. The sublime was beyond her register: it is hard to take her picture of Madame de Staël strumming her lyre seriously, and when, late ...”

“... a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an ...”

“... lyrics, set to be sung by (and sometimes it seems written in collaboration with) Henry and William Lawes. These poems often have a perfectly unambiguous clarity of theme and language as though they are a single musical line designed to stand out from its setting. Herrick’s lyrical simplicity and directness of expression had an enormous influence on ...”

“... the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ I remember​ the first time I saw, or ...”