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“... quotes the delightful story, told in Geoffrey Faber’s Oxford Apostles, of how the convert W.G. Ward once described a dream he had had, in which he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed: ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with ...”

“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”

“... and she chafed against the lot which compelled her to watch her menfolk destroying wild life. John Gore, in his life of George V, suggested that her intellectual life might have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years. George was not a man who lightly opened a book, other than a stamp album, but his bride read to him at ...”

“... three scholarly biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful; all were admirable, if in different ways. W.J. Bate, who had been interested in Keats ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the poet in 1939, paid special attention to Keats’s ...”

“... position to propagate Catholic views, and he returned to England in 1856, where he was asked by John Henry Newman to go to Dublin, with the prospect of becoming professor of English literature at Newman’s new Catholic university. It was a disaster for Julia, Arnold’s wife, but ” to Newman it felt like a providential coup: the son of the leading ...”

“... exactly proper to an important occasion. Nearly forty years later he was writing on the suicide of John Berryman with just the same suitability. I have heard the sigh Of Berryman as he Exhaled his everlast- ing breath and leaped out- ward and down. That sigh hangs in the air I breathe for ever and will hang. Fellow bards ...”

“... and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are written in ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... notes as a royal road to Dickensian interpretation. This was followed by Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt’s Dickens at Work (1957), and by the same authors’ ‘Clarendon’ Dickens project, which enshrined a full transcription of the working notes as essential editorial apparatus. If archaeology into the substrata of Dickensian composition is how we ...”

“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, ...”

“... is primarily a storyteller, and has never been shy of letting us know it. In The New Confessions John James Todd speaks confidentially to the reader: ‘Anyway, I digress. Let me tell you something about this enterprise upon which we have both – you and I – embarked. Here is the story of a life. My life ... If on occasion I have used some innocent ...”

“... but approaching death – not exactly preparing for it (nothing that stoical) or trying to ward it off (nothing that deluded), maybe just getting through the days – as a musician, by making music. The media’s obituary machine cranked into motion, with everybody – including me – feeling they had the need, and the right, to have their say. I ...”

“... Cherry Orchard, and who evades all attempts to trap him into marriage with Madame Ranevskaya’s ward. Chekhov, as Pritchett says, ‘admired this self-made man’, and sharply warned Stanislavsky that he must not be played as the traditional grasping vulgarian of a stock stage part. Pritchett intuits that Chekhov himself had ‘an unusually low sexual ...”

“... class in Georgetown. There is no society to climb, only a precarious foothold above the pauper’s ward and the immutable savagery of the up-country Indians. The Armstrongs are not even an extended family; there is no kinship net for Genetha to fall into. Nor are they nuclear: what should be the nucleus of the family, the house, comes and goes with whoever is ...”

“... Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ came out at much the same time as John Pocock’s The Diary of a London Schoolboy 1826-30, published by the Camden Society. John Pocock, 12¾, decisively a real person, was a builder’s son who lived on the edge of Kilburn, two miles out of London ...”