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“... more and more into them. Rushdie infected the Indian novel with a similar disease. Novels like I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-nama, and Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel are driven by a frantic ambition to include within their pages all of India and all of its history. In Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, however, not much happens, although even this ...”

“... humans ‘could write endless poems on the beauties of springtime or the graceful curve of a young girl’s breast, but they could not say anything fundamentally new about the human situation’. As for a satisfied philosopher, once the quest for a full understanding of human nature is finished, little remains (apart from the odd bit of reviewing) but to ...”

“... to all but the meanest citizens of the republic of letters, the novel is an obelisk for the late Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 shocker, The Closing of the American Mind. This book, which was a late product or blooming of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, argued that the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned open ...”

“... My favourite recent book about the Queen is called The Queen’s Knickers by Nicholas Allan. It is a picture book for small children. The centre spread presents several rows of knickers for every royal occasion: Union Jack knickers for state visits, black knickers for state funerals, tartan for Balmoral, knickers printed all over with corgis for home, and appliquéd with real holly for Christmas, ‘which is why she keeps her Christmas message very short ...”

“... Bedsonia. Henry Bedson had been trained as a virologist by the doyen of British smallpox experts, Allan Downie of Liverpool University. Downie was the eighth son of a fisherman from Rosehearty in North-East Scotland. He had an identical twin, Ricky. Together they won all the prizes and ended up with identical marks when they qualified simultaneously with ...”

“... to go and read Wittgenstein and George Eliot have been spending delicious secret hours enjoying Allan Quatermain’s phlegmatic accounts of people crushed to death, impaled, dismembered and beheaded. (Anyone imagining that ‘violence’ in fiction and films is somehow modern or post-modern should re-read some Victorian male-romances of the Haggard ...”

“... for her Aunt Maud’s conversation and tries out the following: He was a man; he was a man; not a young man: along in years; well, like Uncle and me; along in years; well, along in years. He was a man; well, George, didn’t he say he was from Boston? Well, a nice man, you know; a nice type of man; I wish you could meet him; well there was something sort of ...”

“... Cochrane’s Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English (Icon, £6.99), Humphrys says that a young man who used the phrase ‘proactively networking’ when applying for a job at the BBC ought to have been ‘publicly executed’. So what should be done with whoever wrote the following? ‘In response to this challenging scenario, the conference will ...”

“... of his father enabled him to abandon what had been the immediate plan to become a teacher, and the young man who was already a member of the ILP and the Fabian Society was pitched into no more proletarian a job than that of being on the staff of the Monmouthshire Labour News. He had become a journalist instead of amemberof that Scottish teaching profession for ...”

“... about their potential consequences, and mostly vague recommendations regarding their reform. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, described on the New York Times best-seller list as ‘a critique of liberal arts education during the past twenty-five years’, has been widely considered as a distinguished part of this broad critical ...”

“... a proper respect for Herschel’s scientific eminence. But the most indignant response came from a young journalist at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. This was Edgar Allan Poe, who had just weeks earlier published a short story, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, about an accidental ...”

“... Just as​ their mother married a man who had a menial job in the family firm, Diane married Allan Arbus, who, having dropped out of college, was working doing paste-up in the Russeks advertising department. Diane was 13 when she met Allan and 18 when they married. Their daughter Doon was born in 1945, when Arbus was ...”

“... Boyd, 54, of Chesterton Court, Stockton, Teesside, has been charged with the murder of Nikki Allan.’ And I knew I was going back to Wearside.I found it utterly changed: the infrastructure, the industries, the politics. Sunderland is a university city; the garths have been demolished; St George’s crosses flutter from the balconies of the flats built ...”

“... illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In 1881 the Haggards had returned to Britain, leaving their fellow settlers to buy and sell the veldt for what it would fetch, or dig vast holes in search of gold and diamonds. Haggard had then ...”

“... anything, or is simply an overblown caprice, may depend on the susceptibilities of the reader. Allan Massie’s development as a novelist has been less ambitious, though with each novel he has become more solid, circumstantial and impressive. The Death of Men, his third, though it lacks the very individual mordant melancholy of The Last Peacock, is his ...”