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“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot appeared at the end of 1935, not quite three years after its subject’s death, and must be one of the very last examples of what was by that time a gravely endangered species. In the preface to Eminent Victorians Strachey had wittily mocked the solemn pretensions of the Victorian and Edwardian monumental biography, ponderously discreet as an old-fashioned manservant: but 17 years later Marrot found it still possible to produce a work of unblushing hagiography ...”

“... came from what might be called indirect patronage, such as the sale of proofs and manuscripts to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and patron whose interest had been sparked by Pound. Even the advances and royalties that Joyce received from the Egoist and its book-publishing wing were not the result of profits: Weaver subsidised both operations, and when she ...”

“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait ...”

“... hot topic among literary critics at the moment, particularly the so-called ‘new historicists’. Lawrence Lipking’s The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), for instance, elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same ...”

“... existence offers some insight into wealth and its corruptions. Lemprière’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk is an astonishingly assured first novel, stretching across two centuries and much of the known world, with a title reminiscent of Foucault’s Pendulum. Both books construct a web of skulduggery and institutional conspiracy, the one involving the ...”

“... our minds work. Both interpretations may have their own kind of truth, or lack of it. When T.E. Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom of his flogging and rape by the Turkish officer at Deraa, one of his biographers takes the account at face value, and another as total fantasy. A writer who wishes to undergo an experience can do so if he has the ...”

“... making a proper spectacle of himself. His peers had difficulty in fathoming this phenomenon. T.E. Lawrence thought Coward had ‘a hasty kind of genius’. Sean O’Casey spat spiders at the mention of his name: ‘Coward hasn’t yet even shaken a baby-rattle of life in the face of one watching audience.’ J.B. Priestley, as late as 1964, taxed him ...”

“... stop a young boy from losing his life. Parallels with the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence will also be made. The Metropolitan Police has learnt from its PR disasters in that case and has proudly announced that the hunt for Damilola Taylor’s killers is the biggest since Jill Dando’s murder. As far as is possible, the Met has attempted to ...”

“... In 1990, Lawrence Stone published a book called Road to Divorce. Bold, original, pungent and wide-ranging, it was at one level an attempt to convey the vagaries and varieties of matrimony in England from Tudor times to the Marriage Act of 1753, and the extreme difficulty and distress involved in legally separating from a spouse before the passage of the Divorce Act in 1857 ...”

“... humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’ A hundred years elapsed before Lawrence spoke of novels with equal warmth or extravagance – the one bright book of life, etc – and an hour or two browsing in John Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction will be enough to persuade most readers that not many ...”

“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan seek to map a new course for the post-socialist Left, and to turn attention away from that beguiling but now exploded theme, egalitarianism. The long fixation with egalitarianism has, they complain, allowed the Right today to ‘appropriate the word liberty and equate it with the acquisition of power’; and the phenomenon of Thatcherism would certainly bear them out ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... keen old buzzard’, against right-wing accusations that his report into the case of Stephen Lawrence, with its ‘Ceausescu-ish recommendation that it should be possible to legislate against racism even in a private place’, is yet another instance of ‘the race relations industry’ and ‘political correctness gone mad’. (Criticism didn’t come ...”