“... two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was trying to get to know.’ He read Marx and Marcuse to impress a ‘long-legged socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy ...”

“... you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play is at full ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”

“... a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could have read the painting as anything other than a brazen self-portrait by an unrepentant homosexual, the pinky finger up his nose being a stand-in for a middle finger raised in general defiance.After art school, Warhol moved to New York and found work as an ...”

“... did not intend the city’s siege but had ‘bumbled into it’. Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that ‘the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the programme.’ Far from just changing his mind from one week to the ...”

“... The third was written in April 1895, possibly on the last day of Queensberry’s trial, and read: ‘Dear Constance, Allow no one to enter my bedroom or sittingroom – except servants – today. See no one but your friends. Ever yours Oscar.’ Wilde had wanted to stay in London for all the rehearsals of The Importance of Being Earnest, but had, on ...”

“... racing. Every day when he got home from work I would go into his bedroom and sit with him while he read out from an evening paper the runners for the following day. Quite often we would all go racing on a Saturday, especially when there was a meeting at Kempton or Hurst Park or Windsor, and this was the one sort of family outing I always wholly ...”

“... were those of most reporters new to Vietnam: this was like no war we had ever covered, or even read about – if it was war at all, and not an armed demolition job. But I shared the perceptions of the time: there must be some higher intelligence, some plan directing all the furious energy; and, even if the design was less than perfect, the plan must ...”

“... the ‘inheritance of power’ that occurred with Bashar al-Assad’s succession in 2000. But Richard Cromwell seriously tried to liberalise the Protectorate; the army felt threatened and deposed him after nine months. Assad fell ill in 1983 and it seemed for a moment that his younger brother, Rifat, would take over, in what would have been an ...”

“... Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an ...”

“... should take their destiny into their own hands and return to the land God had promised them. He read the Bible as history. He was horrified when the Zionist Congress of 1903 considered a proposal to resettle Jews in Uganda; only Palestine would do, and in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom the same year he began making his own plans for ...”

“... corrugated roof. Several women in the group approaching the tomb wear white T-shirts that read WE MISS YOU JOHN. One of them, no longer young, kneels in front of the grave, murmurs a prayer, then kisses the portrait before getting up, half in tears, to embrace her entourage; a young man behind her strikes up a Dinka song. The woman is Rebecca ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”