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“... Sunday afternoon salon. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... 1970 there was also a huge rise in the number of attacks on Bangladeshis. Seventy years earlier, Arnold White, in whose book Reaney’s anti-semitic comments appeared, had teamed up with Major Evans Gordon, the MP for Stepney and founder of the British Brothers’ League, in a campaign to restrict Jewish immigration. Successfully so: in 1905 the Government ...”

“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an Etonian contemporary of Francis who also died young. 26 August. Do not renew my subscription to the Friends of Regents Park, one of whose aims seems to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined £25 for ...”

“... from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic engagement. (The big difference is that the great and good of Breslau in the 19th and early 20th centuries more or less ...”

“... literature and especially of poetry as a discourse transcending local contexts. If literature, as Arnold famously declared, is a repository of the best that has been thought and said, it is the best for all times and not merely for its time; and if literature is infused with so general a wisdom, does it not follow that those who are responsible for conveying ...”

“... to the ‘public good’ or else to the Jewish people, where these sometimes seem to be the same. David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the National Library, puts the case this way: ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people … Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his ...”

“... is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties.’ I heard Colonel David Hackworth say: ‘Hey diddle diddle, it’s straight up the middle!’ I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95 per cent of the Iraqi casualties were ‘military-age males’. I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: ‘On one stretch of highway ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”

“... laments the defective art of a great many industrious contemporaries. His principal targets are Arnold Bennett and Wells. These are men he cannot dismiss out of hand, but he complains that neither is interested in what he liked to call the ‘doing’. Bennett’s Clayhanger, he memorably but unjustly remarks, is ‘a monument exactly not to an idea, a ...”

“... gaze was Homerically expansive, even taking in the claim, as the anthropologist Bettina Arnold describes it, that the ancient Greeks were actually Germans ‘who had survived a northern natural catastrophe and evolved a highly developed culture in southern contexts’ – a preposterous fantasy, but worth pursuing for archaeologists who coveted ...”