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“... In one sense, as the advertising claims, this is ‘the only book to tell the full story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair’, for there is no other book that tells that story. Written by three journalists from the Sunday Times, it presents the existing state of knowledge, but tidied up and reduced to order, and with some ‘investigative’ embellishments probably added ...”

“... looks charming and faintly dangerous. ‘The RFC attracted the adventurous spirits,’ wrote Cecil Lewis, whose Sagittarius Rising (1936) is the classic Flying Corps memoir, ‘the devil-may-care young bloods of England, the fast livers, the furious drivers.’ Airmen needed a low heart rate, had to be able to hold their breath for 45 seconds and to stabilise ...”

“... When housekeeping was still difficult after the second war we used to lunch quite often at the Chester Arms, which stood nearly opposite where we lived in Regent’s Park. The pub was run by a delightful family, a handsome widow and her two pretty daughters. We once took an American to luncheon there. Could he have been an American officer? I can’t remember ...”

“... in Angola.’ Such statements go beyond the ordinary bravado of a Rambo. They reflect what Tony Lewis of the New York Times has described as ‘the new globalism’, the ‘most important conceptual movement in American foreign policy in years’. Lewis defines this concept, deriving from ‘the ideological right’, as ...”

“... When Sir Lewis Namier was lying on his death-bed, he is said to have looked up radiantly at his wife and declared: ‘What a pity! Yesterday was the first time I saw in my mind’s eye the Survey of Parliament as a whole.’ A pity indeed, for the insight allegedly offered to Namier on the point of death has never quite been afforded to any of his disciples and successors ...”

“... Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem consists of a monologue by each of these. Like ‘Immram’ and ‘The more a man has the more a man wants’, ‘7, Middagh Street’ is a beguiling mixture of the serious and the silly. Muldoon skittishly connects the ...”

“... come they are almost immortal?’, or to use Martianus Capella’s term, borrowed by C.S. Lewis, longaevi. Perhaps they weren’t human after all. Once again there was a hardline view: they were spirits, and since they weren’t angels they must be devils, which meant that those who believed in elf queens dancing in green meadows – in the words of a ...”

“... Conrad. It is a commonplace that Brookner writes better about women than about men, as the unhappy Lewis Percy testified. The men in Brief Lives are important but they are kept in their right place, which for Brookner is the background, and as background figures they are perfectly convincing. Owen is beautiful, eager to escape from his over-loving ...”

“... best book I know on the relationship between sporting culture and success is Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s account of the 2002 Oakland A’s baseball team.† The argument is compellingly simple: sports teams are run like gentlemen’s clubs rather than businesses, and clubs don’t base their business decisions on facts but on codes and intuitions. A ...”

“... if “Rocket 88” (on which it was clearly based) did not already exist’. A year or so later, Chester Arthur Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf, turned up at the studio. Burnett, originally from Tupelo, like Elvis, performed on an early Saturday morning radio show in West Memphis that advertised farm implements and dry goods. An announcer at the station ...”

“... with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that Kallman had wept over her poem, which is about seeing a moose during a bus journey. The first reference to ‘The Moose’ occurs in a letter to Marianne ...”

“... reign, Henry Audley appears as a follower first of the earls of Ulster and then of the earls of Chester, and finally of the King. He was a royalist captain I215-16 and rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in ...”

“... Cockney songs, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘bits of Welsh stuff … Norse sagas … and Lewis Carroll and Lear and God!’ And Eliot. He listened closely to the allusive mimicry of The Waste Land before setting out to do the war in different voices. It seems clear that he also absorbed the ensemble scoring of Sweeney Agonistes – its velocity and ...”

“... doctrinal teaching concerned the untrustworthiness of such poetic usages. Auden himself, a great Lewis Carroll fan, would possibly have said that Mendelson gets away with it by paying the images extra; and the prose does have at moments a slightly expensive quality.Carpenter tends to run into the opposite problem: not so much of overvaluing symbols as of ...”