“... cannot be personalised, as it was in the Royal Navy, where Petty Officers led us in prayers for a gentleman whom they invariably described as ‘our gracious sovereign: Lord King George’. One can speculate, perhaps not very profitably, on the implications of this difference in style. What is surely more important is how much it mattered. When I was an ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the side altars will seize the main pulpit ... to lecture the vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... that sort of picture, as do Dostoevsky’s own letters, a selection of which has been edited by David Goldstein and Frank. The editing is superb, the notes meticulous, but it must be said that Dostoevsky does not come into the category of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... as a cloth merchant, using them to examine twills, rather than as a classically educated Heer, or gentleman, such as Huygens. Technology was one area in which he could meet the likes of Huygens eye to eye. Snyder’s survey of Leeuwenhoek’s career attends carefully to his lens-making, which, while using accepted methods for grinding and blowing ...”

“... gun enthusiast, the conman, wise guy, lecher, poète maudit and even the hectoring parody of the gentleman from Porlock, who shows up on the dot at Ginsberg’s door to interrupt his swooning congress with the East. ‘A man who uses Buddhism or any other instrument to remove love from his being in order to avoid suffering, has committed, in my mind, a ...”

“... reflection would steady me up.’ When old Adam died, aged 100, he was regarded as ‘a great gentleman’, ‘an inspiration and almost a saint’ to generations of Scouts. None doubted ‘the simplicity of his faith, his unquestioning belief in the rightness of all he did’. Three of Adam’s sons, though, remember him for his follies and ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... the country and move it forward. He struck us as a new kind of politician, a player rather than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us ...”

“... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...”

“... mind to studying pictures. It could be said generally, for the 17th and 18th centuries, that a gentleman or a man of letters attracted to the visual arts would have had higher priorities in mind. For Sorbière, the work of documenting objects and artistic careers was a job normally conducted by ‘the servile and mechanic’ (to adopt the contemporary ...”

“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... even mention the word ‘Conservative’. This had worked in 1918, when a coalition led by David Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, and including the Tories, secured an electoral landslide.Not this time. Churchill rendered Attlee a great service with his disgraceful broadcast warning that a Labour government wouldn’t allow free expression ...”