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“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... at its usual rigmarole./ The gopher pining for a caramel’. (The gopher must be Jefferson; Washington himself had wooden teeth.) The rigmarole, the parallel lines and the idea of polygraphy all comment on Muldoon’s writing of history in ‘Madoc’. ‘Madoc’ may be enriched by reading it as or with a parallel text. Either a Dictionary of ...”

“... which he found feathering the ‘uncomfortable nest’ of another recluse, the Sydney painter John Passmore: ‘curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist.’ The ugly face of Holden’s Performance gets in the way of a more seductive writerly presence that now unfolds, years later, in Eucalyptus. This sweet-talking book sidesteps many hurdles by ...”

“... that had accompanied Rembrandt from his late twenties; or the wrinkles and pinched lips in the Washington portrait of 1659 to the painter’s recent bankruptcy and critical eclipse. Then, perhaps, the Zeuxis from Cologne of 1662 could take up the story – Rembrandt now defiantly posing as the painter whose unfashionable images of ugly humanity caused him ...”

“... recalled now with ferocious irony.’ In 1946 he took up the post of Polish cultural attaché in Washington: a non-Party poet in such a post lent respectability to the regime; in any case, there were not yet enough Party members to go round. He never recovered from his first glimpse of New York from the Hudson River: ‘The gigantic city itself was an ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral.’ He is watching the chess hustlers in Washington Square when he sees a skinny black man, his face hidden under a baseball cap, his arms ‘painfully thin, like two twists of fuse wire’, take down the local champion. As the victor counts his winnings, Seth hears him sing, and repeat, a single line ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... day frog of Australia, even the blue poison-dart frogs raised in captivity at the National Zoo in Washington DC. What was happening? The culprit, veterinary pathologists discovered, was Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The fungus, which makes it difficult for amphibians to soak up the electrolytes they need to prevent their hearts from stopping, was spreading ...”

“... took a while for everyone to notice. In U&I (1991), his witty exploration of his feelings towards John Updike (‘this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation’), he mentions his surprise at being compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge by ...”

“... about the way the industry sees the world. Bergin’s account starts in the 1980s with the rise of John Browne, the cosmopolitan striver-turned-mogul who was BP’s chief executive from 1995 until 2007, when a young ex-boyfriend sold the story of their relationship to the Mail on Sunday and Browne resigned. (He has since headed the Browne Review of higher ...”

“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... not to have to stand trial for treason (and not sane enough to be released from his hospital in Washington). For D.W. Winnicott and people who share his views, Adam Phillips writes in his new book, ‘the distinction between sanity and madness always has a question-mark over it.’ Phillips doesn’t want to get rid of the question-mark, but he thinks it ...”

“... they’re ghosts. The main action of the book takes place on a single night in February 1862, in Washington DC’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Every character we meet in the graveyard, save two (a nightwatchman and Abraham Lincoln) is recently dead. Convinced the coffins in which they spend the daylight hours are mere ‘sick-boxes’, and half-persuaded that they ...”