“... the county untouched by squaddies, pongos and pads, and so has never known the boom of night-time field guns and matutinal coats of soot. More typically the armed services treat great swathes of Wiltshire as if they are invading or colonising forces. The lives of their personnel are hermetic, often by choice; they enjoy voluntary apartheid. They come, they ...”

“... on the door. On the step is a man barred from the house: Richmond Roy, his features ‘exceedingly frank and cheerful’. He wants to see his wife. According to her father, the expostulatory Squire Beltham (a descendant of Fielding’s Squire Western), she returned to the family home years earlier after finding Roy to be ‘a liar and a beast’, and has since ...”

“... of housekeeping: she had had to come to terms with another family problem, a wastrel brother Frank who gambled heavily and gave away family jewels to his women. This last was a heinous offence in the eyes of Princess May, who in later life was able to recover unauthorised gifts from various quarters. As a great lover of jewels, she must have been ...”

“... FACTS series on BBC2 to satisfy yourself that these concepts aren’t much in use on the training field. ‘Magic’, ‘class’, ‘great’, ‘nice’, ‘terrific’ and ‘unlucky’ seem to be the main epithets on offer there. In the post-goal frenzy, when the players roll and cuddle and leap in that delightful way, what are they saying to each ...”

“... real ‘moles’, if any, were the previous Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Frank Cooper, and British Aerospace. Similarly, the warrant issued to investigate the Scottish BBC was so wide that it could have dragged in everything from Postman Pat to The Epilogue. At the same time, broadcasting’s technological base is in a state of ...”

“... Fella, there is a group photograph of the entire Modern Movement in architecture (the lot, bar Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe), and there’s Jim, modestly in the back row but practically in the middle. The progress (or retreat) of the Modern Movement in architecture from its Thirties role as a revolutionary cadre of the Popular Front to its ...”

“... of Greek artists. The main weakness of 19th-century understanding of the Greeks lies in the field of Greek religion. Some people recoiled from it because it was not Christian; others took it to be more like Christianity than it really was; few saw that the place it occupied in Greek society could not be compared with the place Christianity has occupied ...”

“... affectionate, and all life-long.’ What of that first impetuous excursion to Delphi with young Frank Lushington, when the happy pair decked their hats and horses with wild flowers? ‘I do not think the key to this is precisely sexual attraction, but the spring in Greece at full blast,’ says Levi, in the spirit of Honi soit. The diaries of that period ...”

“... joined to the interesting associations connected with the day, drew vast crowds of persons to the field of Culloden. Most of the teachers in town indulged their pupils with a holiday and groups of little wanderers might be seen in all directions spreading over the moor, or sitting by the graves of the slain ... Others, more advanced in years, were intent on ...”

“... past decades have not, strictly speaking, either claimed to be English or cared to be thought so. Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton are proud of their Manx, Welsh and Irish roots. As a result, each one’s journey from the periphery to the centre, from the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class core, from ...”

“... subjected to as a young man, describing the Vienna experiences as ‘an escape into reality’. Frank Kermode was listening and, much moved, wrote to Keller: ‘I filled out, with my own fears, the understatements of your talk. I suppose it must be that the school bully, the military sadist, and perhaps oneself in certain moments are, though insignificant ...”

“... it makes a major move, such as the recent expansion (the doors reopened on 21 October), the entire field shifts with it. Funded mostly by Rockefeller money, a fledgling MoMA appeared in 1929 in rented rooms on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and ...”

“... domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his ...”

“... not a little danger in his own make-up – perhaps he wishes there was more. Aitken is sometimes frank about the great defects of Nixon’s character, but overall he wishes to exonerate him from the worst of what he’s been blamed for, including Watergate. He rightly points out that Nixon was hardly the first to play dirty: as Attorney-General, Bobby ...”

“... to Gelpi, plumbs great depths. Despite its uniquely complicated motives and its unusually frank statements of intent, living in Time is in fact the logical outcome of Gelpi’s methods and beliefs, already demonstrated and outlined in his two important books on the American poetic tradition, The Tenth Muse (1975) and A Coherent Splendour (1987). In ...”