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“... It is no coincidence, as the academics say, that what joins Karl Miller, now of the LRB, to Ian Hamilton, some time of the New Review, is a dominant, not to say overbearing, personality. Either man is able, by force of self-belief, to make good contributors expend, on an article, energy that they might otherwise have saved up to write books. Getting less ...”

“... though, is always evident, and the suspense level usually flickers just above the zero mark. Again, it is a matter of excess, of Mailer never knowing when to stop, nor – it seems – much caring. ‘ “Why, as slowly as you wish,” said the Pharaoh, and inclined His hand most graciously.’ No doubt we are meant to be similarly gracious. And ...”

“... do with Thomas’s bird-watching. This really is a passion – and once again Wintle seems on the mark when he connects Thomas on the look-out for rare birds with Thomas the God-seeker on his knees. In each case, it is a long and passive quest, not always worth it, but for Thomas patience and faith can come to seem like virtues in themselves. Best of ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... of Watt’s workers are humble volunteers: ‘They don’t do it for the money. For them, it’s Mark Bosnich calling them George or Steve.’ Others view their tasks as inherited family traditions: Brentford’s chief steward, for example, is the son of a Brentford turnstile operator and already has two daughters selling Brentford programmes. For ...”

“... the stick-up thatch, the all-over-the-place arms and legs. Ross’s body resembled a huge question-mark, somebody said – perhaps too neatly. Thurber found it indescribable: those arms and legs were never still. ‘He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off.’ Harpo Marx said that Ross looked like a cowboy who ...”

“... in 1996, they can get a fix on how much nicer they are now. And this in turn keeps them up to the mark: they do things that won’t seem too terrible in four years’ time. Or forty. Even the most rudimentary diary can have this usefulness. ‘Did I really have lunch so often with him/her? Assuredly, I’ve travelled far since then. And, even allowing for ...”

“... very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien this feels conservative, as well it might when one sees Goodwin and Gribbin’s diagram showing the life zone here on Earth stretching just 25 km from below the ...”

“... too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should have been a rereader of The Idiot. It is a mark of his poetry that it frets in all childishness, praising and blaming, over the actions and reputations of the great, while managing to make people feel that it is itself the work of a great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of ...”

“... was long-lived and in the last century the greatest exponent of the rhetorical ruin was Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay is represented here by four lithographs but the chance to make interesting and much needed connections with the 18th century in his use of neoclassicism and reworking of Piranesi is not taken up. Finlay’s own temple of protest in his ...”

“... before it can be set loose in the world. A Psychical Experiment (1887) by B.F. Cresswell    Mark Darrell cannot decide which of two sisters to marry. One is beautiful but not bright, the other brilliant but plain. His scientist friend Ernest Marshall has invented a technique for transferring personalities and offers to experiment on the sisters. It is a ...”

“... the children’s weeklies. The person chiefly responsible for the new note of jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars ...”

“... rather than developed), the novel’s principal historical figures – Burr, Jefferson and Hamilton – are vividly imagined. Burr is the Vidal figure (in the later novels, it sometimes seems, everybody is the Vidal figure); Hamilton is motivated by a mixture of personal and psychological as well as political ...”

“... cap and bells have been worn variously in the 20th century by Bernard Shaw, Muggeridge, Willie Hamilton, Sylvie Krin and Spitting Image. Their jests have served to make the institution stronger than ever. Christopher Hitchens – although he can poke fun with the best of them – offers an unjestingly rational argument for abolishing the English ...”

“... adrift among the gaming wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton takes an immediate fancy to Edmund. ‘You remind me of Chingachgook’ he announces, not ...”