“... his students, Jean Coutts (Rowe confirms the well-known story that he sent her a note enclosing a brand-new lady’s handkerchief, asking if it was hers). By early 1941 he was working in MI14, the intelligence section attached to the War Office ‘which dealt with Germany, the German armies of occupation and the profiling of senior German officers’. Rowe ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being lavish of his professions of ...”

“... over Vietnam be revenged. Thus it was only a matter of time before the crepuscular world of William Casey was exposed to view. ‘Affair’ is too bland a word for the Iran-Contra connection. Remember that it involved the use of skimmed profits from one outrageous policy – hostage-trading with Iran – to finance another: the illegal and aggressive ...”

“... who worries about the homeless and the hopeless in our inner cities; who found Thatcher’s brand of conservatism to be lacking in humanity; who writes letters which on occasion show real insight and depth of feeling; and who works assiduously in the discharge of his public duties. Thus described, he is probably the most civilised and sympathetic member ...”

“... and ‘Hamiltonised’, as Keith Lehrer puts it, by the respectable but inferior philosopher Sir William Hamilton. In the second place, he suffered greatly in the collapse of the great tradition of Scottish philosophy, caused principally by an influx of scholars from south of the border. In the third place and fourth place, it may be noted that, although he ...”

“... The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no breaking out of the ...”

“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”

“... Road, a narrow two-lane road, one side of it lined with dripping trees. On the other was a brand-new development of large houses, built close together on tiny lots and ornamented with minuscule front lawns and comically topiaried shrubs. Almost at once, we passed a street-sign for Crabtree Avenue. We continued along the narrow road, looking for a spot ...”

“... local languages should be preserved and propagated via printed grammars and dictionaries, men like William Carey in India and Heinrich Schon in West Africa effectively influenced which colonial peoples and cultures became more influential. Moreover, in the process of being reduced to order by translators, clerks and printers, indigenous languages were filtered ...”

“... A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous generation. In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters ...”

“... young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants. In recent times, this level of regret has become somewhat operatic, and this can’t simply be due to the fact that so many of the recent journalistic fabricators are ...”

“... Nato for having bombed them. Statism has its devotees in the cloister as well as the torture-room. William Edmundson’s recent Three Anarchical Fallacies argues that anarchists are committed to thinking not only that there is no obligation on citizens to obey the state, but also that belief in the legitimacy of the state entails the existence of such an ...”

“... to express the degrees of ‘obsession’ and ‘addiction’ involved: ‘Yes, you are exactly my brand of heroin,’ Edward says, while Bella describes a one-off dose of ‘unnecessary cold medicine’ as ‘gratuitous drug use’. And so it goes on, with various Native American werewolf and evil Old World vampire subplots, for 1600 ...”