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“... supporter all his life, votes for Thatcher, impressed by her conduct in the Falklands. He stops reading the Mirror in favour of the Sun. He buys his council flat. Maureen, meanwhile, discovers she has a talent for creative accounting, and gets a part-time job cooking the books for her hairdresser. A year later they move into a new house in Milton ...”

“... dimension referred to in the blurb, and rather think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”

“... chapters, all by different hands. This was the remit set by the late M.M. Postan and his pupil Peter Mathias. Postan, who creatively dominated British economic history for so long, loved debate about the kind of framework or historical idiom one should employ for different purposes. The present volume, the penultimate one in the Cambridge Economic History ...”

“... and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.’ Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987) got the same kind of treatment; even Stella Rimington rubbishes it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like ...”

“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... phases of aggressive mobility and defensive stasis, during which Douglas would pass the time reading National Velvet, Alice in Wonderland, The Quest for Corvo, a short Survey of Surrealism and Also sprach Zarathustra – his copy filched from an enemy vehicle, ‘the owner of which had pencil-marked in it most of the quotations applicable to Nazi ...”

“... about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... What, Phelps asks, is the general impression produced on the mind of a foreigner by reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and others? ‘It is one of intense gloom.’ These old-school interpreters of the Russian spirit would not have felt at home in the intellectual world Elif Batuman comes from. A Stanford comp. lit. PhD, raised in New Jersey ...”

“... biographers with ‘a particular investment in Schumann’s madness’ who ‘inevitably ended up reading Schumann’s life backwards’, and cites his ‘lifelong inclination to silence’, as well as his fondness for generic composition (piano music, songs, symphonic works, chamber music, oratorio, in successive periods). But the suggestion that his use of ...”

“... else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ‘golden age’. I’ve read a huge number of these novels over the years, so when I was asked to write about Ngaio Marsh I blithely ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies, she thinks that rhyming English would have been pointless, and Peter Dale’s rather desperate versions (Penguin, 1978) surely prove the point. To the povre Villon, importuned, resurrected, sanctified in heretical pantheons, Sargent-Bauer is a dependable ally. No dutiful translation like hers can hope to ride with the ...”

“... of the University of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he ...”