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“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... political prehistory of the puzzles in national and cultural identity that haunted my childhood summers, Archipelagic English can’t be beaten. It’s particularly striking to learn that one of the first consequences of the official invention of Britain was the development of a souvenir linen industry. Having helped push through the Act of Union, and ...”

“... in Pultneyville, looking out onto Lake Ontario, was the setting for many of Ashbery’s childhood summers. It was his favourite place and remained so in his imagination. Whenever he could he spent weekends with his grandparents, often to his father’s annoyance. He liked the smell of his grandfather’s pipe and, even before he could read them, the feel and ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... at La Galloise and in every room at Picasso’s new studio on the rue du Fournas – and in the summers he liked her to go about naked, so as to fix the unsightly tan lines left by her bikini. How else did she expect him to put nudes in his paintings now that he never got to see any?‘Picasso finds himself in women,’ John Berger wrote. In Gilot he found ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... with ‘three major houses’ and behaved with ‘generosity unbounded’. Winters in New York, summers in Florida, tennis and swimming and servants to take care of everything else. The children had a whale of a time, except John. His sister remembers her six-year-old brother as puzzlingly miserable in America and even more so when, at 11, he came back to ...”

“... to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there ...”

“... was an era of snowdrifts and fuel shortages, whalemeat, ‘hardship and high endeavour’. The summers, he reminds us, ‘were long and hot. And whatever the season, peace brought with it a sustained outbreak of pleasure.’ There were jobs for all, but few could yet afford even a little Standard or Morris Ten, and most had never dreamt of Mediterranean ...”

“... Socialism, 36 Gilden Road, London NW5’. The brilliant young Trotskyist David Widgery may have had a hand in that family tree. He had recently joined the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. (He went on to become part of the editorial team of OZ, at the time of the famous obscenity trial over its ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”