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“... of the Walrus talking about why the sea is boiling hot or whether pigs have wings, though, since Martin is a University Lecturer in French, a better parallel might be Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s satire on the indiscriminate accumulation of half-digested knowledge. The blurb endorses such comment: ‘...”

“... My friend and fellow crime writer John Creasey published more than seven hundred books under some twenty different names. (He also found time to found a political party called rather grandly the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him ...”

“... operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and Martin discuss Wagner’s influence on others: but all three are too little concerned with the peculiar nature and conditions of Wagner’s own musical-dramatic achievement. Why do so many musical terms, like ‘composed’, ‘resolve’ or ‘tonic’, also ...”

“... In the press box of the Morristown football ground ‘the stockily-built, the tousled-haired, the pugnaciously-featured Attercliffe’ – 47 years old, father of five, separated from his wife – takes notes on the Saturday afternoon match. One eye on the game below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post ...”

“... They became, successively, the most influential publishers in the world: Philip Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960 ...”

“... here as one of Terry’s ‘sycophants’ – the others are Kevin Moseley of the Express and Martin Samuel of the Sun. Scholar suggests that – on the matter of Pleat – he knows more than he is saving, and no doubt he does: after all, it was he who chose to accept Pleat’s resignation. ‘I was particularly upset, as I had believed he was going to be ...”

“... extent secret proselytisers for their own work; they are all secret agents. As Pritchett says of Graham Greene’s Collected Essays, ‘let the academics weigh up, be exhaustive, or build their superstructures – the artist lives as much by his pride in his own emphasis as by what he ignores; humility is a disgrace.’ Pritchett’s judgments are emboldened ...”

“... dominated by macho violence and the cruelty of the elements. It comes with a recommendation by Graham Greene who says: ‘The story held me so completely ... I wish I had written this book.’ At first, this is a little surprising – for the adultery that triggers off the action is an ordinary American adultery, without sacrilegious or metaphysical ...”

“... has spent 38 years on his own, because his wife and daughter were killed in an air raid; Martin, a forlorn little boy neglected by his shoddy parents. They are all portrayed with skill, insight and sympathy that at times becomes moving. But something seems to have gone wrong. The author’s sensibility seems to be at odds with Clare’s, in a ...”

“... well-connected. The brief section devoted to the adolescence of the children – Della, Bayard and Graham – is ironically presented as idyllic in the traditional sense. It is this, but it is also haunted by past horrors and disasters – pervasive images in all Vansittart’s fiction – such as the sinking of the Titanic and a picture of a First World War ...”

“... 2012, detectives arrested the Sun’s executive editor, Fergus Shanahan, its managing editor, Graham Dudman, and assistant editor Chris Pharo. A fortnight later, they arrested the deputy editor, deputy news editor, picture editor, chief foreign correspondent and chief reporter. In March, the defence editor was arrested and, in April, the royal ...”

“... room and sordid surroundings which are all he has to offer her. It is not much of a marriage. Martin is not particularly affectionate nor particularly faithful, and as Paulina turns out to have no children she is in no position to ask for anything better. Yet gradually a touching picture emerges of a quietly courageous young woman, able to make friends of ...”

“... during Adams’s time at Arsenal – excluding for the moment Arsène Wenger – was George Graham. Graham looms very large indeed in Adams’s account. He undoubtedly admired Graham as manager; he thought him tough and a pro. He, like Adams, knew Arsenal’s limitations and ...”

“... critical essays, with short useful bibliographies to take things farther. In Fifty European Novels Martin Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European ...”

“... was by Leonard Bernstein and the two soon stormed Broadway with On the Town. The same year Martha Graham premiered a rich, visually spare piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of ...”