“... which read into Harry’s serviceable Swedish surname (minus its umlaut), the angst upon which young academics new to the scholarly meadow delight to nibble. But there is a passage late in the present volume where Harry, to please his granddaughter Judy and her guide troop, dresses for the Fourth of July parade in the full costume of Uncle Sam, with ...”

“... On Living in an Old Country, a book of essays which established him as the most interesting of the young cultural critics. He drew ideas from sources as diverse as Agnes Heller and Tom Nairn; in turn, his thought was rapidly and efficiently mined in the campaign against the ‘heritage industry’ which took shape in the later Eighties (I speak as one of the ...”

“... sometimes observed, through binoculars, by the patient and vigilant Charlotte Shaw. Molly’s young husband, also a devoted Shavian, seems to have put up with all this fairly complacently, no doubt taking into consideration the antiquity as well as the celebrity of his rival. There are strong signs that Molly and the old man did make love, if only ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... Live rather than going to NBC’s Dateline), and misbehaving celebrities like Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson are their meat. On the evening in question, Primetime Live had managed to get hold of a recent O.J. girlfriend – a pretty, big-eyed, unbelievably stupid model – who insisted that she knew he was innocent.Innocence of some sort ...”

“... and Sixties he became the acknowledged sage of Anglo-American war studies, always ready to help young researchers and delighting in the homage implied by requests to consult him. Danchev cites an extraordinary number of scholars and soldiers who admit a debt to him. I would probably be on the list myself had I had the sense to accept the offer of an ...”

“... Lord Chamberlain, Eric Penn? ‘He was in my house.’ Sir Edward Ford? ‘He is my cousin.’ Sir Michael Adeane! ‘He is my wife’s cousin.’ The Queen Mother? ‘She was a great friend, before marriage, of my wife’s.’ For Hart-Davis, naturally, it is more a question of active connections, with authors, other publishers, people of one sort and another ...”

“... has been on the defensive. The first move was to prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of ...”

“... out quite respectably.I have always liked the old phrase about ‘the forging of a nation’. Most young nations carry false birth certificates, either some teleologically-twisted brand of history which proves that Slobodnian independence was the inevitable outcome of the dialectics of progress, or else – and not infrequently – literal forgeries. Look at ...”

“... explain what Hippomenes is doing in such a strange position. Reni was surely right to show Saint Michael and Samson in triumph rather than in combat: triumph is more easily reconciled with beauty. But Reni’s figures are beautiful because they are transfigured by heavenly grace, enraptured by some high ideal, or because it is essential to their pathos. The ...”

“... forward. The willingness of the Lib Dems to accept an apparent fait accompli, like the NHS Bill or Michael Gove’s education ‘revolution’ or even the extent of the spending cuts, was the result not simply of parliamentary weakness or feeble leadership, but of the ambiguities of their own policy and rhetoric. For the last thirty years or so, the Lib Dems ...”

“... needs to learn everything. The Cabrini public housing project in Chicago, where Sennett lived as a young boy, gave its inhabitants almost no part to play in decisions about its everyday running. They were managed but not seen, treated as if they couldn’t possibly have any ideas about the structure of their own and other people’s lives – ‘rendered ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its past cannot long expect to enjoy its future.’ A Tory politician asking us to include among ‘the national ...”

“... to suppress my fear. ‘And what is your ■■■■ check list?’ ‘You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to Jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.’ ‘And what crime is that?’ I said. ‘Look at the hijackers: they were the same way.’ Aside from the points on ...”