“... a Manhattan winter, ‘flu in my bones like a lantern’, sustained only by the thought that back home all is going on as always: the seas warm and the neighbours in the open together, ‘talking over palings’. But his opening Caribbean poem begins, disorientingly, with the ‘islands hissing in rain’, the intemperate weather symptomatic of a sea-change ...”

“... Service Order. This very high honour brought him, on recovery, appointment as a brigade major at home, and when the brigade moved to France, his efficiency won him promotion from that plum staff job to a succession of others. In 1918, he was chief of staff of a division and in 1919 a battalion commander and lieutenant-colonel. Good luck also then saw to it ...”

“... reality, as well as the splendour, of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were ...”

“... with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment was, in MacKillop’s paraphrase, ‘tough, but not unexpected or unjust’. Annan was Provost of King’s and knew the Cambridge system, if that is the word, intimately. But MacKillop also knows it, and, with his ...”

“... been set up to provide a richer diet of drama, music and variety than the staid and news-oriented Home Service. The first guest was Vic Oliver, a popular Austrian musical comedian. Plomley scripted the episode and the transcript survives. Talk was squeezed in round the edges of the records: a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with ...”

“... was nativism, which was accused of papering over such local abuses as slavery, genital mutilation, home-grown despotism and racism. ‘We don’t have any problems with the blacks,’ an Afrikaner said to me out of the blue as I was standing in line in a cafeteria in South Africa in 1991, ‘it’s they who have problems with each other.’ Whenever ...”

“... on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new ...”

“... hope these purple passages don’t embarrass you.’ A couple of years later he writes: Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on ...”

“... than amid our financial convulsions. Where would a character called Madoff have been more at home? Nonetheless, Shakespeare, the rival of whom Jonson wrote with magnanimous prescience that he was not of an age but for all time, has left him far behind. Only a few of Jonson’s plays, Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and perhaps Epicene, are ...”

“... the detention camps, controlled villages and courtrooms of Kenya were mostly hidden from people at home. They knew some of it – indeed, did what they could to put an end to it after the scandalous British beatings of detainees at Hola camp in 1959, which left 11 dead and 60 seriously wounded – but nothing like the whole. Alan Lennox-Boyd, colonial ...”

“... with a collapsed economy and a peculiarly debilitating colonial legacy dating back to 1885, when Lord Randolph Churchill, the secretary of state for India, dispatched an expeditionary force to sort out the ‘Burma problem’ of the day. When the Burma Expeditionary Force seized Mandalay, British policy-makers decided not only to dethrone the ...”

“... applied to Venus (and on occasion, Mercury). Belzebuth is better known as Beelzebub, the ‘Lord of the Flies’, which would appear to be an insulting mistranslation into Hebrew of the name of a Philistine god: the original ‘would have involved a form of Baal, a common title of Phoenician and Canaanite gods’. Stratton-Kent suggests a correspondence ...”

“... is at first sight a strange way to describe a man who so resolutely avoided the discomforts of his home country. But the subtitle signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist ...”

“... some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English ...”

“... disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the ...”