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“... even aestheticians, will often shy away from confronting questions of aesthetic evaluation. Not so Anthony Savile, who in The Test of Time offers a full-scale investigation of the matter, unashamedly, and unfashionably, bringing to the fore such notions as depth and beauty and artistic stature. The aim of this thoughtful book is to analyse and to ...”

“... I have always thought of Richard Wollheim as embodying the values and interests of a particularly urbane kind of British intellectual, typified by and possibly originating with the members of the Bloomsbury Circle. It encompasses a serious interest in the arts and especially the art of painting; a dedication to some version of socialist politics; a faith in psychoanalysis as therapy and as a theory of the mind; a commitment to articulate an aesthetic philosophy and in some measure to attempt to live by it; a determination to enhance one’s prose with a certain literary surface; and a profound concern for friendship and the life of the heart ...”

“... Anthony Hecht​ never changed. His poems, first and last, look as if they’ve been measured, cut and stitched on Savile Row. His first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954), displayed a glutton’s appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm ...”

“... theme, boys, children, whatever, and in 1946 Methuen published a book written by Gamlin and Anthony Gilbert called Don’t Be Afreud! A Short Guide to Youth Control (The Book of the Weak). The book is just about as funny as it wants to be, with author photographs (‘aged 7 and 8 approx’) and a caption: ‘The authors on their way to the ...”

“... stuff preserved by ambiguous clauses in his will, stuff let loose on the nation first in 1988 via Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another ...”

“... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely familiar, a chorus of hard-tongued ...”

“... uncertainty seemed elemental, and he was more absorbing than Famous Actors like Olivier, Brando or Anthony Quinn. But there hasn’t been a book, a Life to hold on to, a place to bring questions – and worries. Now, all at once, there are two of them, and I must warn you, you need both.There have been books before, some of them opportunist, some earnest and ...”

“... by a steady stream of leaks and exposés of establishment institutions – the BBC and Jimmy Savile, the manipulation of Libor, News International and phone-hacking – which deepened suspicions that all of public life was a sham. There was a creeping sense that democracy itself was based on deceit, a trick played on the innocent by the powerful. Britain ...”

“... on to what we then called secondary school.As it was put together, the programme tended to confirm Anthony Powell’s thesis that documentaries aren’t based on the evidence but are simply scenarios dreamed up by the director with the facts arranged accordingly.I’ve never been particularly concerned about the end of the grammar schools, seeing it as nothing ...”

“... the other aqua. I told Julian that Boateng was the famous black British suit-maker of Savile Row. ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘It fits the blacksploitation theme I’m hoping for with the film of my life. I want Morgan Freeman to play me.’ He began stripping off and I saw he had a pair of Tesco’s trackie bottoms under his old suit. He ...”