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“... the 2008 debate season is fitting the pattern of every series since the early 1980s. No major, Gerald Ford-type gaffe, no obvious, Reagan-like knockout blow, but a careful, well-rehearsed negotiation for minute advantage, contests in which confidence, body language, expression, and even forms of address have proved as important as points of ...”

“... and has been imitated by successive New Statesman columnists – Richard Crossman, Paul Johnson, Gerald Kaufman, Matthew Coady et al. (One only has to listen to the Parliamentary speeches of Gerald Kaufman to see how this sub-genre, once picked up, is hard to drop.) The origins of the style lie, only too audibly, in the ...”

“... not just to Keynes’s early polemic but also to such historians as Peter Krüger, Gerald Feldman, Harold James and Niall Ferguson). The core of Mayer’s message was that the Russian Revolution was central to decision-making at Paris; that when the slogan bisogna fare come en Rusia was adopted by the ...”

“... most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who ...”

“... for killing off perfectly healthy people, say, because he needs them out of the story. Gerald Dawes in The Longest Journey is an example: ‘Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match.’ No need for more, though more could easily have been supplied. This is machinery; plots need it and ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common ...”

“... somewhat higher, and they might hobnob with the great in salons and house parties, where, as Henry James sometimes suggests, they were cultivated for their celebrity or their charm rather than for their books – see, for example, ‘The Death of the Lion’. Society was open to the talents, but to have the right background could only help, and MacCarthy’s ...”

“... paying the Fitzgeralds’ bills for a decade; the friendships with Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and above all with Hemingway; the insanity that crippled Zelda during the Thirties, and the alcoholism that devastated Scott; the prolonged composition and demoralising failure of Tender is the night; Zelda’s institutionalisation in ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... James Hepburn opens his history of literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business ...”

“... want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He ...”

“... his critical judgments on the films are tendentious, his lengthy comparisons of Hitchcock with James, Dowson, Chesterton, Poe and Hieronymus Bosch can be left unread, and his accounts of cultural history are often laughable (‘Artists and writers and even the man in the street admitted that moral values were certainly changing very quickly, and some ...”

“... offered by her fellow royal chroniclers are conspicuously at odds. Haseler just wants a republic. James Whitaker believes that Charles will soldier on magnificently, but only if he shows Camilla the door. Conversely, Anthony Holden and A.N. Wilson want him to step down, but disagree over who should replace him. And Dennis Friedman puts the whole Windsor mess ...”

“... they danced in the streets on a magical VE night, bright anti-aircraft searchlights overhead. Gerald’s boozy proposition – ‘What about a baby then, old girl?’ – fitted in with the evening’s high jinks: ‘they had to round off their victory night celebrations somehow.’ But they don’t have a fairytale marriage – Ivy and ...”