“... father was ill and out of work and he and my mother brought this card to the lodge at the brewery gates, where I was sent for from the cellars. They weren’t sure what a first was. ‘Does it mean you’ve come top?’ asked my mother, not particularly surprised as from their point of view that’s what I’d always done ever since elementary school. I went ...”

“... Life and Times, with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings, by Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, published by Grove Press in New York and the Olympia Press in Paris, was an extraordinary book. It included potted histories of Ireland, the Congo and the Putumayo in the Amazon basin, an account of Casement’s life and death, his ...”

“... are parked. In the tall trees of lovely green oases with regulation ironwork fences and locked gates. In strictly private equity and ‘single-family’ offices with no nameplates in Berkeley Square. If you wanted to make serious money in Mayfair, you could do worse than supply cans of magnolia paint to the Duke of Westminster’s estate: it is the only ...”

“... By comparison Pepys’s linguistic aberrations have an innocent air. It has been pointed out by David Nokes that the Companion is distinctly reticent about sex. In this it reflects the new edition as a whole: the facts are there, but not dwelt on (good) or ever really analysed (dubious). Not only is there no entry for Sex (as Nokes again observes, ‘Health ...”

“... little purpose. There is not much sign that Labour has learned the lesson. The new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is in some ways the worst possible choice. From what he has said so far it is evident that there will be the same dishonesty about crime, the same boneheaded attitude to drugs, the same belief that a Labour Party just re-elected with a majority of ...”

“... to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but are out of reach in person. Communication is one-way only. The old tribal codes of hospitality and chivalry have been ...”

“... Left Movement. He drove out into the hills with a taxi driver called Erasmos. They stopped at some gates, and he walked down on his own to a farm that had been taken over from an absentee landlord; the occupying students had turned it into a co-operative. Who are you? Hugh was asked, and what did he want. ‘To see the revolution,’ he replied. It is not hard ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... yell by comparison, though I concede this is a minority opinion.)My Life as a Man swung open the gates for one of the greatest thoroughbred runs in American letters, but even as Roth assumed full command of his powers, the controlled burn of his anger and vivacity, he would be sidelined and knocked flat by health problems that would have tried a saint, and ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... to symbolise vigilance and defence against the menace of spreading infection? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second biggest contributor, after the US government, to the WHO’s $2.4 billion budget. Gates is a believer in the tech fix. ‘I believe we are on the verge of taking historic steps to reduce disease ...”

“... Gentlemen were still marked off from Players as first-class cricket enjoyed golden years of huge gates and crowd-pleasing stroke play. There was nothing austere in the manner in which London’s favourite pro, Denis Compton, amassed runs in 1947, and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and ...”

“... Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But look what a shit he is. We’ll open the gate wide, wide, and all become ...”

“... Museum, the Ashmolean) closed. Also all the colleges, and not just not open to visitors, but the gates actually locked. I ring the bell at Exeter but there is no answer so we hang about until an undergraduate goes in (entry now by Swipecard). An expressionless figure in the lodge, looking like a middle-ranking police inspector, says the college is closed. I ...”