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“... on how many whites lived there – that is, whether there were enough to keep the blacks down.) Philip Murphy, the excellent editor of these fascinating volumes of (mainly) official documents, confesses himself at a loss to explain why Nyasaland in particular was ever included, unless it was simply to justify the title of ‘federation’, for which ...”

“... fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to ...”

“... of Phena at News of Her Death’. It had previously come to mind at news of another death, Philip Larkin’s, because of his once pinpointing essentially the birth of his own art: the moment when he stopped condescending to Hardy’s. ‘As regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that “the gloom is not even relieved by a little ...”

“... bristles with comic potential. One of the most salutary aspects of Johnson’s criticism, as Philip Smallwood has pointed out in a previous study, Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment (2004), is that it refuses to take itself or its subject matter entirely seriously. When Imlac, venerable tour guide of Johnson’s Abyssinian ...”

“... of bourgeois morality, but The Accidental Woman is clearly the work of a young man who’s read Murphy, Watt and First Love. The allegiance to Beckett is chiefly signalled by a studied disdain for the conventions of realism (‘Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one’), along with some suitably ...”

“... in Hands Scraping (one Serra’s, the other belonging to his sometime performance collaborator Philip Glass) are drawing in reverse: shovelling, sweeping, picking and wiping up a heap of steel filings. And in Hand Catching Lead, the blackened artist’s fingers snatching at falling shards of metal are at once drawing’s tool and the surface drawn on. The ...”

“... of the whip or turn him out of the party. You just say he is a monarchist or has plotted to kill Murphy’ – Macmillan’s American counterpart – ‘and you shoot him off to prison or a Saharan concentration camp. Then, a week or two later, you let him out and make him minister for something or other. It’s really very exhilarating.’ Ball’s picture ...”

“... a hope rather than a reality. Even at its most functional, Corbyn’s office was chaotic. Karie Murphy, to whom Corbyn eventually outsourced much of his decision-making, is said by one staffer to have declared: ‘This is a left-wing collective. There’s no one leader.’ Murphy insists that she never exceeded Corbyn’s ...”

“... Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William ...”

“... against the rain, and Rome seemed a place not of eternities but of passing trade. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor entered the restaurant in his civilian uniform of open-necked shirt and windcheater, smiling to the waiters and taking his usual table. I didn’t approach him, but took time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the ...”

“... possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of ...”

“... rather too well told already – in his books, in his widow’s autobiography and her memoir of Philip Toynbee, in Toynbee’s memoir of Romilly – for the importance of his role in the world. The best of the book, for me, was the section dealing with Esmond in wartime aircrew and his farcical, bumbling attempts to remedy his inborn accident-proneness ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite view, most ...”

“... had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now Moore became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. They divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village ... and I ...”

“... flash and is put in perspective by the next item, a much more extensive piece about how Eddie Murphy invited a transvestite prostitute into his car with a view to putting him/her on the right road.3 May. To the Chicago Art Institute, a relatively modest museum but with superb paintings. It’s Saturday and very busy so I confine myself to rooms with ...”