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“... truth to the minutiae of experience, and immense curiosity. These are Boswell, Harriet Wilson, and Byron in his letters and journals. Much of Cockshut’s book is taken up with the autobiographical treatment of childhood. As he emphasises, childhood experience is never ‘as it happened’, but always as the mature autobiographer shapes and ...”

“... noticed in a mullioned window, White lace cap rising, brooding over her table, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant Translates onto starfish and nacred shells Montalembert’s Monks of the West Still weary, awash with hackwork to support Dead Maggie, Marjorie, Tiddy and Cecco, Her water babies, breathing ectoplasm, She watches aqualungs glow with ...”

“... virtually nothing: and certainly, if measured against the tireless activity of the governments of Wilson and Thatcher, the titans of British political history emerge as pretty small beer. Such a change in popular expectations did not of course occur overnight, and there was a long-drawn-out period in which both political cultures co-existed with and rivalled ...”

“... The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year ...”

“... reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as ...”

“... and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American war in Vietnam: the same complaint was addressed to other Labourite ...”

“... were failures, that Labour never managed to become ‘the natural party of government’ as Harold Wilson wished, and that this was reflected in its failure ever to get elected for two full terms. Traumatised by four successive defeats, Blair wanted above all to make Labour electable and then to secure those two full terms. This would demonstrate that Blairism ...”

“... matters.* The widespread impression that the book is mainly about MI5 attempts to destabilise the Wilson Government is quite wrong – there are just a few pages about this. Most of the book is an account of the endless mole-hunting undertaken in the aftermath of the Burgess/ Maclean/ Philby affairs and the construction of Wright’s case that the MI5 ...”

“... central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or near ...”

“... Stephen Wall sees as crucial those passages in An Autobiography where Trollope rhapsodises on his equality with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear ...”

“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”

“... season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and ...”