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“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... One example can stand for many. The US Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 by Richard Nixon, has been responsible – under both Democratic and Republican leadership – for a large share of the improvements we now take for granted in the restriction of toxic chemical release, fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of ...”

“... voice, chain-smoker, very intense. He would give a thoughtful answer about the weather. Rock-like, stone-like face, and then suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not ...”

“... Giving the lie to such pitiful evasions was her startlingly unladylike demeanour, by now stone-butch and crusty to a cartoonish, if not phantasmagoric degree.Sympathetic readers have long hailed The Price of Salt for having a putatively ‘happy’ ending. Scare quotes seem fitting, however, because, as always with Highsmith, the novel has more than ...”

“... scarcely survive a reading of Professor Jones’s excellent history; it would probably be killed stone dead by even a cursory glance at Russell Taylor’s Going for Broke, which is subtitled ‘How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds’. Going for Broke occasionally exasperates because of its lack of organisation ...”

“... funny old man’. He makes a pot of money, which he buries in the garden of his stone-built house: he expects the house to last for ever since ‘it cost a hundred pounds; and that’s a lot of money.’ The last, mildly fulfilling act of a featureless life is the discovery of an heir, representative of the true Guernsey spirit, to whom he ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the recovery of ...”

“... I be so, From my cold heart let Heaven engender haile, And poyson it in the sourse, and the first stone Drop in my necke: as it determines so Dissolue my life, the next Caesarian smile [smite] Till by degrees the memory of my wombe, Together with my brave Egyptians all, By the discandering of this pelleted storme, Lie grauelesse ... The idea is of the ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech ...”

“... People sometimes saw her on the street, giving her money away to strangers or sitting on a stone bench in Grace Plaza, feeding the pigeons, but after a time she disappeared. She spent the rest of her life in and out of halfway houses and hospitals and died of heart failure in a nursing home in the Rockaways, four years ago this month. Maeve Brennan was ...”