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“... makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often do (Joyce’s love of Puccini, for instance, or Auden’s dislike of Brahms). Tchaikovsky, that great melancholy confectioner, has hardly any temperamental affinity with Pushkin’s novel in verse. Eugene Onegin’s sparkling 14-line stanzas – little private carriages of ...”

“... What fills our lives? We can’t manage without the grand abstractions of belief or love, but in the end they mostly come down to the engrossing triviality of our daily routines. What we usually do is keep things going. True for everyone: but especially true, or so it has seemed, for women. The really basic questions – what we are to eat today, what will happen to the children – have always been for women to answer ...”

“... a sad slave sit and think of naught Save where you are how happy you make those. So true a fool is love, that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply than this. But Sonnet 57 is the voice of the man, the man who achieved both great comedies and great tragedies. The poem is not actorish, it is ...”

“... mother and the sexual attentions of a Calvinist nursemaid. When he wrote in the preface to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that he wanted to ‘show that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones’, he was both pointing up a (modern) moral, and more than hinting at a personal experience. He moved a lot ...”

“... to hold hands. For the second week he took her sight-seeing when she was so sore from his love-making that she could hardly walk and felt that she should have been resting.’ They had already found two incompatibilities: Emily was to go on finding Edwin’s sexual demands repugnant, and Edwin was never to share Emily’s enthusiasm for the seaside ...”

“... He arrived on his first Monday in ballet pumps and a little black cape. ‘What is that?’ asked Harold Ross. The runner’s pencil-sharpening colleagues left the great editor none the wiser. ‘He was an absolutely gorgeous apparition,’ said Brendan Gill: fluttering, flitting up and down the corridors of the magazine. He was indeed tiny. He and Miss ...”

“... world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record Benn’s obsessive love affair with the square mile of Westminster (‘my village’), where he was born, went to school and worked for fifty years. Free at Last displays the great Parliamentarian, as familiar with the historic fabric of the House of Commons as he is jealous of its ...”

“... probably unrivalled by that of any other poet before or since – was neither the dark Childe Harold, nor the sexy Don Juan, but their even darker, even sexier author. The Hellespont-swimming, freedom-fighting, countess-shagging Byron, hurtling around Europe with contrails of scandal streaming in his wake, was a more Byronic character than any he had ...”

“... Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a hollow sham. But Lewis clearly feels that Hogg is, well, lordly. In a sense this hits the nail on the head, and not just because he was twice ennobled: having disclaimed his ...”

“... was published in the United States in 1923 but, because of the notoriety of Vita and Violet’s love affair, it wasn’t published in Britain for another 50 years, by which time both women were dead. It was the formidable Lady Sackville who insisted that the proofs be pulped and publication abandoned. ‘I hope Mama is pleased,’ Vita wrote in 1920. ‘She ...”

“... His point of view is more that of a journalist than of a scholar or scientist.’ Absorbed, with Harold Acton and Brian Howard, in the creation of a daring aesthetic manifesto to be called ‘The Eton Candle’, Connolly would have been greatly disturbed by this deflating prophecy, which was soon to be echoed by a boy called Jessel, one of his friends and ...”

“... for long before encountering a touching anglophilia, the primary ingredient of which seems to be a love for the ‘British sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a ...”

“... delay’. In his justly celebrated Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, published in 1982, Harold Jenkins looks at the vast literature that has already appeared on the subject of ‘delay’ in Hamlet, and reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the ...”

“... Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review ...”

“... Times crossword. More recently, Edward Heath never quite overcame his unease with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor ...”