“... have produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters ...”

“... ruthless mastermind (Wise), the unwilling henchman (Forman), and some of the gang’s stooges like Herbert Gorfin, the none-too-bright office boy who was set up by Wise in later life as a bookseller to merchandise his dubious pamphlets (out of a mixture of snobbery and prudence Wise resolutely maintained the pretence that he himself was not a book dealer): but ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”

“... society. There is a terse prose-poem, ‘Pan Cogito’s Thoughts on Hell’, in which Zbigniew Herbert gives a parbolic account of such an artist’s position: ‘Contrary to popular belief, the lowest circle of hell is not inhabited either by despots, matricides or those who are seekers after flesh. It is a refuge for artists, full of mirrors, pictures ...”

“... statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi Germany and the urban plans of Robert Moses, meant to confirm leftist suspicions that the Western democracies are proto-fascist. Nonetheless, Hart’s novelistic treatment of 1940 reveals a wild grain in his conservatism, a sympathy with maverick energies that has occasionally disturbed the ...”

“... series of Modern European Poets in Translation, he was championing poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, whose preoccupations were more wide-ranging and, in many ways, more urgent. What seems to have characterised Alvarez’s tortuous path is his continual rolling back of the many false claims and promises – the blandishments – of ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... we know Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass. In its vague uplift this is close to Herbert Asquith’s poem of 1915 about the ‘Volunteer’ who is rescued from a life of humdrum clerking and who in death is described as having his lance ‘broken in life’s tournament’. War is a chivalric affair: although in ‘The Prince of ...”

“... an artist without understanding his relationship to Diego, yet Lord is – with the exception of Robert Wernick – the first writer on him to do justice to that subject. He delineates subtly and accurately the relationship they seemed to have when one knew them, in middle age and onwards. And he unearths events and habits in their childhood and youth which ...”

“... reason that it would mobilise the suburban electorate in such a way as to wrest power away from Herbert Morrison’s London County Council. Hence Labour’s natural coolness about the proposal. But when a Conservative Government got around to legislating the GLC into existence in the early Sixties, the fringe suburbs were excluded, thus allowing Labour to ...”

“... not many Surrealists were active in the Resistance. Éluard participated, as did the poet Robert Desnos, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died a year later at Theresienstadt. Another committed Surrealist was Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob), whose marvellous anti-memoir of texts and photomontages, Aveux non avenus, has appeared in a new ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”