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“... 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately ...”

“... friend’s toy boy: ‘She says she found him in Sun Valley, but I’m still betting that she took him out of a tree. He’s awful + behaves like a bad waiter.’He kept a tight rein on feelings, which is why song was so crucial to his mental balance. Only in a few passages, such as his detailed description of seeing the casts come off his shattered legs ...”

“... amassing a huge fortune as a royal servant, it is certainly unlikely. Apsley’s mother was a St John, from an elder branch of the same family as Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St John, whose daughter married Apsley’s cousin Sir Walter St John, denounced by his Royalist opponents ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... had begun to seem even to him a long war against the doctrinaire in literature. Against what he took to be the prevailing modern orthodoxy of Symbolist poetry – ‘the main rule is that a poet must never say what he wants to say directly . . . he must invent a way of hinting at it by metaphors, which are then called images’ – he promoted what he ...”

“... that they can’t be solved? Proposing the reform of London’s local government in the Commons, John Prescott expressed Labour’s desire to make the city’s administration ‘more open, more accountable and more inclusive ... It is about modernising the government of the capital, and giving power to the people of London.’ The city does need to regain ...”

“... so great a claim to the gratitude of his country’. Less than two years later an ex-colleague, John Cam Hobhouse, commented: ‘I am surprised how, by mere fluency of speech and arrogance of manner, this really inferior man has contrived to lead a great party, and to connect his name imperishably with the most splendid triumphs of British ...”

“... would conclude that legislation in this area was a mistake, a view expressed on television by Sir John Wheeler, Conservative chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs – if so, those hopes were disappointed. Why were the terms of reference so narrow in any case? Discussion about the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation, as the report ...”

“... for being captured 13 times and 17 times sold into slavery, going from the Ethiopia of Prester John to the Japan of the Daimyos and St Francis Xavier? Some say that he was a prodigy, as well as one of the great Portuguese classics, the prose equivalent of Camoens; others say that he was a liar. Rebecca Catz says that he was a satirist, that his whole ...”

“... final version will come into effect at the beginning of next year. There had been worries about John Whittingdale, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, and the plans he might have for the BBC, but the organisation envisioned in the White Paper isn’t vastly different from the BBC as we know it. The £3.7 billion from the licence fee will ...”

“... archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys? Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the ...”

“... his poems, though, that while in the East he chased up images of Buddha with what his biographer John Haffenden calls ‘a learned amateur interest amounting to an obsession’. The offhand phrase about Marvell is a bit of English disguise: camouflaged passion rather than easy generality. Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from ...”

“... the difficulties, the hesitations, the ideas and explorations, with her friends. In 1936 she took the unprecedented step of sending her manuscript to the printers without showing it even to Leonard. She reworked the book at proof-stage, cutting it from 700 to 420 pages, hating every minute of the work, driving herself close to complete mental collapse ...”

“... Many current problems seem likely to grow worse. In 1980, the bottom half of earners in the US took home 20 per cent of all income; by 2014, that figure had fallen to 12 per cent. The richest 1 per cent, meanwhile, went from earning 12 per cent of all income to earning 20 per cent. Variations on that theme played out in many countries. The old centre-left ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”