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“... no treatises and left no personally revealing documents. His own views on religion, politics, love, good life, poetry, philosophy, history, creativity, theatre or anything else are hidden from us, much as we might wish it otherwise. Bate gets the familiar disclaimer out of the way in his book’s opening sentences: ‘What did Shakespeare believe? We can ...”

“... Some younger people saw her as a sort of relic – people like the Sitwells and Ronald Firbank and Harold Acton – but all that rather bored her. She was very up to the minute, and would be full of the latest musical comedy or the latest thing that had been written. But she wrote a memoir of Wilde, which I published along with his letters to her in a magazine ...”

“... saw as representing a stage of religious development from which Christianity, with its equation of love with torture, was a regression. Moreover he had argued, in his lost book Asymmetry in Buddha Faces, that by giving each of the Buddha’s profiles a separate expression the sculptors produced a sort of icon of unity in dissimilarity, and of the way in which ...”

“... the poem finds a language vividly metaphorical to the point of drama, in which to speak of both love and art in terms of the power they both yield. From first to last, the Master (both Maestro and tyrant) is the Duke himself: ‘That’s my ... for me.’ But while we read, we cannot usefully distinguish between Browning’s voice and the Duke’s ...”

“... idea that the work of art is in some sense about itself. Even in the fine arts, apparently most in love with the visible world, the great painter will be said to paint himself in every portrait. The exquisite old lady reading in a pool of light holds the stillness of Rembrandt himself as he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court ...”

“... to me was to the point: ‘Your aunts and uncles are extremely affectionate people, and they love you and one must never be impolite. Like it or not, we are part of this family, but please never underestimate the levels of stupidity. When I see how stupid all your mother’s five brothers are I feel there must have been some creative design ...”

“... were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film had acquired two expensive stars: Alan Arkin and Goldie ...”

“... together with the small frisson of difference. Publishers, film studios and TV executives love sequels, since they seem to guarantee a ready-made audience. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list at the time of writing shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further adventures of Hannibal the Cannibal in Thomas Harris’s continuation of ...”

“... interfered with his ministers, particularly at the Foreign Office, where he soon replaced Harold Macmillan with the more malleable Selwyn Lloyd. He used to ring them up at weekends or in the middle of the night, often on quite trivial matters. The author suggests this reflected a lack of self-confidence in domestic affairs but strongly denies that it ...”

“... inflicting it on an audience. Hugh and Moggie were suggested by – but not modelled on – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1968 Nicolson’s diaries had just been published with his passionate account of the fight against Appeasement in the Thirties and how, come the war, appeasers like Chips Channon conveniently forgot to eat their words ...”

“... ran into in the 1590s when the dominant literary modes for pursuing advancement shifted from love poetry and pastoral to a mock-rebellion centred on satires, epigrams and the wilfully obscure. (Sir John Hoskyns, for example, features here not only as a pioneer of nonsense but as a quick wit imprisoned in the Tower for seditious quips.) Inspiring ...”

“... Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true crime is not suspense ...”

“... to the heritage of Spanish Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction to Edith Grossman’s translation of 2003.) When he was writing the novel in the early 17th century Spain was racked by an economic crisis whose chief causes included the depopulation of the countryside after the expulsion ...”

“... the shop did her proud. A river of bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, as the BBC declared its love. Westminster sympathisers were heard to say that the warrior queen was the country’s greatest peacetime prime minister, if not the best of all. She was to receive a funeral of the sort that buried the Queen Mother, and had wished for no grander ceremonial ...”

“... is going to make a good book.’ (He was wrong: le Carré wrote a fictionalised version of the love triangle in his only non-thriller, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, published in 1971, which many readers, like the reviewer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, struggled through, ‘gripped by a wild yearning for secret agents’.) Up to this ...”