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“... was, though, eager to have real physicists doing real work at the Institute, so he persuaded David Gross, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2004, along with other prominent scientists like Shing-Tung Yau, Carlo Rovelli and Nikita Nekrasov, to take working residencies in Kharkiv. The science they did, while real enough, and while done in period ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There seems little doubt that she had ...”

“... it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief’. (His favourite childhood book was Philip Gibbs’s Street of Adventure, in which it was written that ‘everything in life is but a peepshow’ and reporters were ‘the only real people in the world’.) Her second subject is the writer and criminologist Fryn Tennyson Jesse (great-niece of ...”

“... His ‘bourgeois cuteness & desire to know where I am’ limited his options. ‘However gross my desires, I fear that I shall never satisfy them for fear of annoying others.’ At the end of 1911 he feels emotionally paralysed and unable to write. In 1912 he has a ‘shamed sense of unused strength’; in 1913, ‘I shall grow queer and unpopular if ...”

“... experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée ...”

“... diversion. A ten-year-old girl says she would prefer a nice clean robot: ‘Its water looks dirty. Gross.’ More usually, votes for the robots echo my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness doesn’t seem worth the trouble. A 12-year-old girl is adamant: ‘For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.’ Her father looks ...”

“... the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with ...”

“... Read, chief apologist for the New Apocalyptics and, in McAuley’s words, ‘a dead sucker for any gross rubbish that came his way’. Foxing the likes of Harris and Reed, editors of a not exactly universally respected magazine with a tiny print run, was, he felt, simply ‘taking lollies from children’. However, in a fit of ebullience some months ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... where it relates specifically to the personality of the poet, always has a teasing quality. Philip Larkin, who admired Housman officially and also less openly, had many of the same characteristics. Housman can be brutally exclamatory and immediate, though always poised. When the bells justle in the tower       The hollow night amid, Then on my ...”

“... a telegraphese for journalism and academic use alike – to subsume the period under two poets, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Their contemporaries can then be located at intervals on the line stretching between these two not wholly imaginary points, with Robert Lowell appearing now at one end, then at the other. An ill effect of this rough-and-ready ...”

“... Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William ...”

“... aspects of Martin’s relation with his father, Kingsley buying his early post-pubescent sons a gross of condoms or doing his imitation of the dog whose bark sounded just like ‘fuck off!’ (‘When he made you laugh he sometimes made you laugh – not continuously, but punctually – for the rest of your life.’) Experience ends with an account of the ...”

“... the hero travels to Hades to find that death has undone all the pointless hierarchies of life: Philip of Macedon is stitching rotten sandals to earn money, Xerxes is begging, and so on. But the point is made clear earlier on, when Menippus tells us that, on earth, things have become sadly inverted: ‘On observation I found these same people practising the ...”