“... the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is ...”

“... the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Not ...”

“... Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards Vietnam, and he wanted Ellsberg to take charge of the day-to-day details. Ellsberg, then 33 years old, was appointed at the exalted civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent in ...”

“... literary editor of the Spectator in 1958, he first commissioned reviews from him, adding: ‘I may have given the impression that Frank Kermode was new to the reading public when he started writing for the paper. That was not the case. He’d already made his name with his fine book, Romantic Image.’ Well, yes, he had in a sense made his name with that ...”

“... and painting have over the centuries owed much to Continental models and practitioners, which may explain why they have ranked as subordinate arts. In literature it is the other way round. We have never absorbed Goethe, Racine or Dante as others have absorbed Shakespeare. Indeed, not the least embarrassing feature of a visit to the Continent is the ...”

“... and wisecracks; you slap your thighs, he is suddenly vulnerably sensitive and very cultivated. May Week was in June, the last instalment of his on-off autobiography, discloses that for years he has been laboriously studying Japanese in a spirit of anything but racist superiority. The volume ends with a carpe diem in James’s hyper-sensitive mode. The ...”

“... of this experience, has been, over the decades since, a writers’ book, praised by T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway and many other notables, but always selling modestly. Hemingway describes it in his letters as ‘the classic example of the really fine book that could not sell’, and suggests that its problem was ‘a style that no one who had ...”

“... lawyers that would make any plea, or any combination of pleas, feasible. His original lawyer, Robert Shapiro, is famous for defending Marlon Brando’s son when he killed his sister’s lover several years ago (this was one of the first cases to be shown on the now very popular Court TV). To this shining example of legal virtue, O.J. has subsequently ...”

“... little measurable influence on sexual orientation in adulthood. Whatever this proves – and it may only prove that the roots of sexual orientation cannot be uncovered by questionnaires – it does not sustain the assertion the authors go on to make: i.e. that homosexuality may be biologically coded. If becoming gay is ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”

“... soup cans (‘Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day’), asked Robert Indiana if Pop was ‘easy art’ (‘Yes’), and sought Jim Dine’s views on whether Pop offers social commentary (‘I’m certainly not changing the world … if it’s art, who cares if it’s a comment?’). He also asked Lichtenstein: ‘Is Pop art ...”

“... who led the 1904 invasion of Tibet and would help finance and organise the Everest attempts, may have been ‘imperialist to the core’, but he was also one of the first to cultivate a mystical appreciation of Tibetan culture, inspiring him to found the World Congress of Faiths. Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition, lived a life ...”

“... will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’s memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest.’ Gandhi notwithstanding, scholars and polemicists continue to catalogue the crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for instance, there ...”