“... I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right little, missionary stew. What for Sweeney is a façon de parler turns in some modern novels – Genet’s Pompes Funèbres, Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien – into full-scale devourings of the ...”

“... Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad dye of an ...”

“... Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of forty or fifty blokes who didn’t cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of ...”

“... success of FDR’s celebrated ‘Fireside Chats’ – the majority of which were recorded in the White House – in creating what Jones terms a ‘sense of intimacy’. In this case, we really do need the visual record. The publicity shots show the president at his desk, a sheet of paper before him, sometimes a glass of water. On the desk stand a gaggle of ...”

“... Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let in’ to white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the ...”

“... emerged from the intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent ...”

“... much they know now; how little they knew before. What is astonishing is how close Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond have come to keeping their secret. If you trace Madame Merle’s emotional position in the novel rather than Isabel’s, the movement of her feeling is as interesting and as intense. It is close to that of Lady Gregory when she sent the sonnets to ...”

“... relates: ‘The thing itself, a wasted flicker of pallid movement, danced and gyrated in white flame before him.’ This thing – the invention of a writer whom Eliot admired – has to do with a hideous, eternally punishable, human sinfulness: ‘greedy loves and greedy hates’. Hamlet walks in the Supernatural Tales of Vernon Lee, alias Violet ...”

“... middle. There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and ...”

“... thereof one must speak.’ The reception of the book shaped Gellner’s career in two ways. First, Gilbert Ryle, senior Oxford professor and editor of Mind, the leading trade journal, decided the book was unworthy of review. Bertrand Russell – whom Gollancz, ever the enterprising publisher, had persuaded to write a sympathetic preface – sent a letter to ...”

“... the passionate hater of Blair and Blairism who has a place in his heart for the Fabians and the white heat of technology; the enthusiast for Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre (above), demolished in 2004, who dotes on Lutyens; the proud insulter of Islam who loves the multiculturalism of Birmingham; the critic of colonialism who relates the horrors of the Opium ...”

“... of lambs’ brains without mayonnaise, even if the mayonnaise requires paraffin oil, fat-free white cheese and carrot mousse? The English adaptation of Guérard’s book has been lightly bowdlerised for English sensibilities of vulgar English empiricism. Thus Guérard’s fruitier apothegms remain in French in the text. The symbol-spices are left out, as ...”

“... hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in W.S. Gilbert, emitting a steady rivulet of the opaque distinctions suited to a spiritual director.’ This strikes me as about right, though Empson’s remarks should be qualified by the awareness that in Auden’s poetry the batty sententiousness is turned into ...”

“... a tense, silent moment in a comedy, made even more tense by the sharp contrasts between crisp white linen and black velvet, and by a dramatic diagonal of light on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani ...”

“... a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties ...”