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“... its apogee. But as the most important player in the crucial battles of the modern world, and the victor in its ultimate war, the US is now trapped in the past. Its history and constitution leave it well suited to take the lead in making the world safe for opportunity, diversity and conscience (the watchwords of the market-state), or they would do if the US ...”

“... Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert Marcuse. (This is important, because a feature of the IS, as it called itself, was that it was inoculated ...”

“... of Britain’s youth, and a tragic precursor for the other three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness ...”

“... to SIS, or both. But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be ...”

“... In a famous procession in the second century BC, the eyes of the crowd all fell, not on the Roman victor, but on the pathetic infant sons of the defeated Eastern king, who were walking with the captives. And Octavian must have known of the impact that Cleopatra’s sister, Arsinoë, had made when she was displayed in Julius Caesar’s procession in 46 BC: no ...”

“... of East and West alike. This other Ransome was, I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never ...”

“... completely lost their minds. You know the rest. Phillips sold Presley’s Sun contract to RCA Victor in November 1955 for $40,000, an astronomical sum at the time. From that point on Sun shifted direction towards white rockabilly, that same year signing Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, both of whom became hugely successful and drifted away a couple of years ...”

“... in the book makes no clearer what Lloyd takes Yeltsin’s options realistically to have been. David Remnick’s book is at its best on the Chechen conflict, though not because it tries to answer the hard questions. It more or less takes for granted that the invasion was both a folly and a crime, and concentrates on bringing home its human cost. The ...”

“... died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and uncredited) David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their ...”

“... the afflicted were one of the sights. ‘On comprend les crétins dont [pullule] la Suisse,’ Victor Hugo wrote from Bern in 1839. ‘Les Alpes font beaucoup d’idiots.’ Mark Twain, in 1880, reported the words of an English traveller: ‘I have seen the principal features of Swiss scenery – Mount Blanc and the goitre – now for home.’ Cretinism ...”

“... it declares. The Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of ...”

“... decision would appear to contradict the principles of the first, it is not entirely arbitrary. As David Foxon established in his wonderful study Pope and the Early 18th-Century Book Trade, Pope was fussy about the details of his texts, closely supervising and altering later editions and moving them away from the somewhat baroque typography in which his early ...”

“... Fabius, Bettino Craxi and Felipe Gonzalez are retreating, step by step, before the market. The victor in this ideological re-alignment, however, is not conservatism, but neo-liberalism. In so far as people are moving away from collectivism, socialism or Fabian dirigisme, it is for the reasons Gould gives. True, there has also been a cultural ...”

“... classes in English, but although he became a fluent reader, he learnt to speak it, according to David Cairns, no more than ‘tolerably well’). The idée fixe had been nourished by the actress’s total identification with her roles – ‘the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart is searching’: now it must have been sustained by less exalted ...”

“... But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water ...”