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“... rule was the only option. With a huge army and navy to finance, the Government was desperately short of money. It also found its right to raise conventional taxes challenged in the courts. The reign of the Major-Generals was not intended to increase military expenditure, rather to reduce it. They were instructed to build up local militia forces – rapidly ...”

“... and explain. This is the least mimetic of biographies. It is a long book about a writer of short fictions. It is full of stodgy sentences about someone whose phrases were like darts. King, close to his subject, is determined not to be bamboozled by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her ...”

“... continuum. Updike’s Self-Consciousness is well up at the art-over-life end of the spectrum; Philip Roth’s record-straightening and strangely flat The Facts is, perhaps surprisingly, of the other type (and his intensely focused Patrimony is somewhere in the middle). Kingsley Amis’s riotous Memoirs are lifelike, too much so for some. Terence Kilmartin ...”

“... the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and ...”

“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab ...”

“... like Adler and Jung – and he, not the patient, was gestating Moses and Monotheism. In short, it’s hard to know where to look when H.D. regrets the death of Freud’s disciple, Van der Leeuw, and the master replies: ‘You have come to take his place.’ Someone had to; the succession needed securing; naturally, ‘the Professor insisted I myself ...”

“... Jennifer Terry has a gift in the popular columnist and self-described ‘motherless’ man Philip Wylie, who coined the term ‘momism’ to describe the American mother’s dominating influence over her children, particularly her sons, and whose bestselling book Generation of Vipers (1942) blamed ‘megaloid momworship’ for most of the problems of ...”

“... haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the Medway from Rochester to Chatham, represents ‘a basic shift from retro to necro’. In Ramsgate ‘light bulbs swing unclothed.’ And the blue-plaqued yawn of Middle Street, Deal is ‘where escapism ends up’. Seabrook’s special ...”

“... of subject matter, and that the writing of prose fiction could be as scrupulously organised as Sir Philip Sidney’s double sestina’. Both The Conversions and Tlooth (1966) present the reader with a cornucopia of improbable inventions, bizarre artefacts, linguistic riddles and mind-boggling discoveries, all recounted in a studiedly neutral tone that is at ...”

“... itch to dig up single spadefuls of the recent past seems somehow fidgety. Choosing to cover such short stretches at a time naturally leads you to insist on how distinct your chosen decade is from the one before and the one after – or else why write about it in isolation? And behind this there presumably lurks the desire to puff up the times we have lived ...”

“... and very little on the ‘low’.Without Model is Adorno at his most relaxed, a sequence of short, sometimes fragmentary texts on aesthetics – a ‘Parva Aesthetica’ – assembled by the author in late life and published in 1967, two years before he died. Much of it hasn’t appeared before in English, which is unusual for a writer whose work ...”

“... about the death of another man, Colin Roach, in a police station; £48,699 to Stephen Dowsett and Philip Tape who were walking home from a dance a little drunk when they were bundled into a police van, taken to a police station and so terribly beaten that Dowsett’s jaw had to be re-set in two places; £17,500 to Manit Schemir, a mechanical engineer who was ...”

“... and whether there have been significant changes in recent years. The immediate questions here, in short, are not those of Marx about the putative overthrow of all élites but those of Pareto about the circulation of élites. At any rate, if this is an inquiry about whether the Establishment as we have known it has now capitulated to the impact of ...”

“... Olivier version, made, like the Branagh version, at a politically sensitive time, was distinctly short of eirenic themes. Not long ago we celebrated two centenaries – of the defeat of the Armada and of the Glorious Revolution. Both confirmed the popular image of the Continent as a source of danger, of monarchical absolutism, expansionist militarism and ...”

“... the tobacco he had smoked as a Clyde-side apprentice before 1914 – and jammed it in his short Stonehaven pipe. He had hopes that my modelmaking might lead to naval architecture. Jane’s Fighting Ships and copies of the Motor Ship would come through the post. I had the interest, and all the shop-talk, but my maths was rotten. Just as well. A hundred ...”