“... to depart for Hungary ‘since you know the Balkans’. Major Grand’s Chief of Staff, the late George Taylor, who had come from Australia (it is very much that kind of story), was unimpressed when I objected that while I had sojourned in Yugoslavia, a manner of Katmandu for the dissident young of those remote times, I had never done so in Hungary, which ...”

“... side. ‘A shadow would come over the ship as soon as you heard you were coaling,’ said George Michael Clarkson (Joiner First Class). The great enemy was dust. All doors would be sealed; small holes were filled with oakum; lifeboats were hoisted outboard; officers and men alike wore their oldest clothes and poked Vaseline up their nostrils and ...”

“... things: Of Machonachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens; Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens Of trench food ...                                            (‘Laventie’) And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish ...”

“... and left it at that, but he didn’t. It was in this wilderness of weeds and wildflowers that Mr George H. Hunter, whose mother had been born a slave, wished to place his grave. Mitchell’s interest​ in cemeteries was another relic of childhood that he brought with him to the writer’s life in New York City. He was kin by blood or marriage to people ...”

“... than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and military ...”

“... allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ‘it ...”

“... matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000-50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a halter-neck dress from the movie Let’s Make Love. I thought of Marilyn and Yves Mont-and posing for the cameras with their ...”

“... it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men already condemned ...”

“... after them.’ These and other details make it tempting to identify ‘Vladimir Epstien’ with George Gershwin, and the ‘Jazz History’ with ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1924. By cutting the description and substituting a jokily off-colour name (‘Tostoff’ comes from ‘Toby Tostoff’ in Ulysses and neatly signals the ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining eight ...”

“... year, sponsors close to the Bush administration set up the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, to try to work out the options – realistic rather than simply desirable – now facing the US and its allies. Securing Iraq was part of their brief, but ensuring the security of the US and its interests in the event of a future withdrawal of US forces ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... process in the finished volume is a matter of rhetoric. It was a different thing when Nicholson Baker, writing about his literary relationship with John Updike in U & I, decided not to reread Updike’s work, or to read for the first time the books he hadn’t finished (or hadn’t started). That was a piquant part of the book’s business, an ...”

“... he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there could be, an element of self-parody. A profile of him when he was president of the Cambridge Union in 1953, which he must have had a hand in writing himself, said: ‘It is far from the flash ...”