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“... But it is difficult to believe that Beauvoir derived any pleasure from such compulsively frank disclosures, even though at the time she was with Nelson Algren and though she claimed that she was only once fearful of having lost Sartre (and that was over Dolorès). In Adieux, Beauvoir writes of a conversation which took place in 1978. Sartre ...”

“... Bevan poured scorn on CND, a crucial episode on which Foot’s biography of Bevan is less than frank. For all his devotion, Foot got Bevan wrong. Bevan was the most talented and charismatic working-class intellectual the Labour movement has ever produced, and had every reasonable expectation of becoming its leader. The parting of the ways with Gaitskell ...”

“... All​ Thayer has is money,’ Sherwood Anderson wrote to Waldo Frank in 1919 about the man who’d just become co-owner and editor of the Dial. Anderson advised Frank to demand a good price for his work: if Thayer ‘does not surrender the money, he is N.G. to anyone’. Scofield Thayer surrendered a lot of money, lavishing it on the artists he admired, and on many he didn’t, including his former friend T ...”

“... we can read it out of anything else we are doing.’ Sacks seems to find in conversation what Dr Johnson found at Charing Cross: ‘the full tide of human existence’. A good rule of thumb for detecting his departures from pure analysis is that his observations become particularly arresting. Consider what Sacks describes as ‘an awfully neat scene’ – a ...”

“... pausing to ask what it could possibly have started out to mean. Shakespeare was condemned by Dr Johnson for enjoying quibbles, and his remarks could be read as suggesting that this revolt against authoritative language reflected a proneness to intellectual and social unreliability. But James understandably declines to think quibbles wicked; a quibble, she ...”

“... course, where a great deal of the humour in writing about foreign places comes from – and Diane Johnson uses it to good effect. When Chloe finds herself in a bathroom with her Iranian friend Noosheen, she is amazed to find that she had no pubic hair. Chloe tried not to stare but it did make a person look strange, statue-like. She could not tell if Noosheen ...”

“... when the crowd turned against him.  Later, to a packed meeting of the parliamentary party. Frank Dobson was first up. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘the Lib Dems and the Tories have not abandoned party politics.’ There was, he alleged, a three-part strategy. When they had disposed of the Speaker, they would demand Gordon’s resignation. If they got ...”

“... masquerading as tutors within the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy which he ran. Indeed, his assistant Frank Pickstock told me that he was put into the Delegacy by the authorities with the task of listening to Hodgkin’s phone calls and reading his letters – the aim being to purge all Communists from the organisation. The trouble was that Ernest Bevin had ...”

“... complained with justice that Shakespeare ‘often obscures his meaning with his words’. Dr Johnson, an expert fault-finder, found many faults, without doubting the poet’s powers. Indeed the necessary warnings were first expressed by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, who loved the man ‘this side idolatry’ – certainly he ‘wanted ...”

“... is much the more difficult to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s ...”

“... allowed more than three-quarters of all Zambians voted to get rid of Kaunda and that he remains a frank advocate of single-party rule. It turns out, by the by, that the whole election was an imperialist plot against the people of Zambia and that the only reasonable outcome would have been for President Kaunda to continue his rule for ever: we have this on the ...”

“... away, resulting in first Reagan’s and now Bush’s plans for anti-missile defence. Cradock is frank about the many failings of Intelligence and the fact that, lacking the ability to decode Soviet ciphers or to place spies on the ground within the USSR, the West was reduced to high-level guessing most of the time. In this respect the USSR, like Germany ...”

“... do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other novels … and campaign vigorously for their reissue.’ In The Rotters’ Club he goes even further and lists the dozen or so ...”

“... lurking in dark corners, and now everybody’s writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley ...”

“... neither of Kennedy’s immediate successors served what should have been their normal terms – Johnson repudiating a life of successful power-brokering and exiling himself to Texas to avoid what he was certain would be defeat in the race for a second term, and Nixon eluding impeachment by a hair. The two decent men who followed, Ford and Carter, seemed ...”