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“... of adults like to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its traditional, electorally friendly posture in defence of the sanctity of childhood – the same ...”

“... different from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics. As for Nix’s boast that they ‘operate ...”

“... combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a ...”

“... In fact, he was remarkably free from snobbery either of the direct or of the inverted type. Mr Philip Williams, in the political biography which he has now published after many years of research, implies that Gaitskell was a good mixer. He cites evidence of Gaitskell’s abiding popularity in his own constituency, the ease with which he made himself at ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... there was evidently something about the tiny Bron, when he appeared, that fell seriously short of the ideal. The boy was swiftly reckoned to be ‘sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual merit’, he was ‘mindless and obsessed with social success’, a sort of ‘defective adult ... sadly boring’. Auberon was about seven years old when ...”

“... Here’s a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words – Philip Roth’s shortest book since The Prague Orgy – structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical excitement, sterilised of jokes, rhythmically muted, baldly plotted, low on confrontation, low on tension, low on brilliancies and generally low all round ...”

“... Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of surveillance, bugging, secret cameras, interrogation, the false smile of Mr Nice and the sincere snarl of Mr Nasty. Security men are sometimes clumsy and might cause us inconvenience through their category mistakes ...”

“... ways of conveying ambivalence on the page. Transgression works to clear a space, as for instance Philip Roth’s gleeful repudiation of sexual respectability in and after Portnoy’s Complaint freed him to sift through his inheritance, literary and cultural, and to keep only what he wanted. Misogyny was part of the unstable explosive charge that gave him ...”

“... subjects. His latest fiction to be translated into English, published as yet only in America, is a short detective novel, Who killed Palomino Molero? Its impressionable and innocent hero is the half-breed Guardia Civil Officer Lituma, who investigates with his cleverer superior Lieutenant Silva the gruesome killing of a young mixed-blood airman at the northern ...”

“... with an intelligent discipline that mostly checks indulgence; it has learned from the practice of short stories, and takes in as it goes the moving accidents of word and look, yet always to constructive effect, always to a larger end. The final passages, tacitly gathering the accumulated sense of Nan’s unsteady transition, at once suspend and satisfy the ...”

“... rewards to those who fit a narrow ideal. Background social prejudices – against people who are short, fatter than average, homosexual, of slightly less than normal intelligence – are likely to fuel the desire for tests that can disclose increased chances of these characteristics (they are unlikely to do more); and those who can afford them will ...”

“... handwriting, of Mozart’s talents. As he approached his fifth birthday, Wolfgang was memorising short minuets on the keyboard. A few months later, he began to produce technically assured pastiches which his father transcribed in the Notenbuch. In January 1762, Leopold took Wolfgang, who was about to turn six, and Nannerl, who was 11, to Munich and then ...”

“... Words without Music​ is Philip Glass’s second book about himself, and it inevitably includes some of the same information, or the same kind of information, as its predecessor, published in 1987 in New York as Music by Philip Glass and in London as Opera on the Beach. But the differences are significant ...”

“... offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the Flame is that rarest of modern things, lit crit with laughs. Hamilton has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis ...”