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“... lists in the library as Doctor Zhivago slowly crept up on Lolita. During that year Nabokov took every opportunity to make snide remarks about Pasternak’s Zhivago in the course of his lectures. Among Russian friends he compared the novel to the works of Charskaya, a novelist who had been popular with pre-revolutionary schoolgirls. The most jaundiced ...”

“... to keep the philosophy of nature aimed at the moving targets of contemporary physical theory. It took us a generation to swallow the relativity of time: we can wait a bit longer, until we are sure we have understood what happened in the Big Bang, before we rejig our traditional notions of eternity. Nevertheless, something vital is missing from the particular ...”

“... ten months of 1997. During the mid-October meltdown, when the other ‘techs’ quoted on NASDAQ took a terrible beating, Amazon.com stock (AMZN) held firm. Investors have faith in it. On the other hand, and rather worryingly, Amazon.com is still not in profit. Nor is it clear when it will be. Bezos used to hazard late 1998. But asked by CNN a few weeks ...”

“... sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he ...”

“... were returning my stare! They belonged to a strangely compelling creature which … immediately took possession of me. This was my introduction to the work of Hirshfield.’The strangely compelling creature was Angora Cat, one of only two paintings Morris Hirshfield had begun before 1939. He was 67. In the seven years before his death in 1946, he painted ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... a jolly television games-player (yes, Arthur Marshall); another, who served in Intelligence, took to wearing bangles and a large diamond in one ear, and was barred from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... and rational tragic form, and indeed what constitutes the tragic situation’. The play – Empson took it as that, not as the ‘charade’ Auden called it – had ‘the sort of completeness that makes a work seem to define the attitude of a generation’. This notion, that Auden was in straightforward possession of all the available forms of knowledge and ...”

“... the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundred most frequently cited authorities (one spot ahead of John Donne) for the earliest evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly Review, who, as ...”

“... nurses and auxiliaries, scanning his patient details, would cheerily address him as ‘John’.) He was already using the name that was to become so familiar, the byline that launched a thousand pieces. Was he already that ‘Frank Kermode’, that effortlessly elegant, perceptive, slyly amusing, wide-ranging critic? Not really, not to judge by ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate plaque, the anagram on the side of the public convenience: toilets. There’s still puff left, after Seabrook has swooped on a Stanley knife lying in the gutter, ducked into a ...”

“... who had set up his first experimental laboratory at the age of fifteen; the same year that he took part in the Hitler Youth Sternmarsch to the Nuremberg Rally. Three years earlier he had rescued a copy of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae from a Nazi book-burning in the grounds of his school in Kleve. During the war he attended lectures at the ...”

“... seat in Massachusetts. The scale of these victories made them particularly ominous. McDonnell took 59 per cent of the votes and Brown 52 per cent, in states where Obama a year earlier had pulled 53 per cent and 62 per cent respectively. Interviews suggested that these contests were interpreted by voters above all as referendums on the Obama ...”