“... absent ptyx in ‘Ses purs ongles ...’, adumbrates another mood: He was out for the day when a vanload of pricks arrived at my father’s house to steal his life: the tables and chairs, the knick-knacks and pix, the grandmother clock, all the family things. The dispossession of the father releases the speaker from patriarchal authority, from ...”

“... live other than extravagantly, and in even greater part to his resuming relations with Lord Alfred Douglas – not only because the allowance from his wife was expressly conditional on his not doing so, but because, as he knew very well, Douglas was sure to bring him further disasters. It was the clearest possible proof of ...”

“... battles of the memoirs, were renewed after the Second World War by the defenders and detractors of Douglas Haig: arguments which for fifty years produced a great deal more heat than light. Only a few works by quiet specialists like Shelford Bidwell and T.H. Travers indicated the true problems and achievements of the commanders on the Western Front. Over naval ...”

“... was, he wrote, ‘a woman of colour’, but a respectable lady’s maid, enslaved to a Lady Douglas. His father, James Wedderburn Esq of Inveresk, was ‘an extensive proprietor of sugar estates in Jamaica’. His father had tricked his way into gaining control of his mother, who then became the manager of his household. ‘But her station there was ...”

“... In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who lived two buses away and went to a different school ...”

“... such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, he may offer up genuine conservatives, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, who reject radical change as a matter of principle. The job of the Senate is to make it clear to the American people which path the president is taking. Under the Constitution, the president’s judicial nominations are subject to the Senate’s ...”

“... the many in the large cardboard box my mother gave to Bill the boilerman, in the hope that one day, after we’d been evicted and found ourselves in a grand mansion, she’d get it back, one photo that I looked at with wonder. My mother was sitting on some steps down to the sea in Monte Carlo or somewhere in the south of France. Walking down those steps to ...”

“... of the soup-kitchen guests return year after year, and large numbers show up well before the mid-day meal. There is surely something distorted in a characterisation of the contemporary United States which finds hope in a soup kitchen and despair in the rest of the country. Undercurrents in The Great Divide – only some of them intended by the author – run ...”

“... and assorted do-gooders and bleeding-hearts. Judicial horsehair sometimes visibly bristles at it. Douglas Hurd, for his part, is thought to be equally angered by the snubs his references have been encountering. It is always the duty of a prosecutor who no longer believes that a conviction can decently be sustained to tell the appellate court so, and this is ...”

“... Congress for authority to raise a regiment of volunteers to fight the wicked Spanish. (Imagine Douglas Feith recruiting a battalion of neo-cons to have a go at Saddam Hussein.) The result was the First US Volunteer Cavalry, known to subsequent generations of schoolboys as the ‘Rough Riders’. With Colonel Wood in command and Roosevelt as his deputy, the ...”

“... nice guys’. The president of Bulgaria is ‘a lovely guy’ and Jean Chrétien ‘a good guy’. Douglas Alexander is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa ...”

“... to be scrubbed because Frank’s group was always on the run: they’d fix a point for a drop one day and be forced to cancel the next as they came under attack. This was mostly how it went for Frank Thompson in Bulgaria: in disarray, unable to secure deliveries, hungry, cold, chased from pillar to post by a well organised, well supplied regime, unsure of the ...”

“... these things that he chooses to record in these so-called private diaries. Here’s a typical day (22 August 1916): I came to town by the early train, went to the bank where they admitted their error in my accounts and then by a bright inspiration on to the Field office where I had promised to be interviewed. After lunch I went to the committee meeting ...”

“... of wine, her love affairs (mostly with women), and her friendships – with Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and others – Bedford writes with touching modesty of all of this, as she does of her ‘intermittent brushes with the catastrophic events of the century’. A narrator rather than a raconteur, the intersections of her own life with recorded history ...”

“... found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play with it and the dogs piss on it. Roland Penrose – a ...”