“... him.’ A lot of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina ...”

“... We now have the sixth and final volume of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to pick up the thread at some intermediate stage of the correspondence, the editor ‘had been taught by George at Eton, where he was an outstanding teacher and house-master ...”

“... and making the occasional foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or Andrew Marvell’s Hull in any case – this study largely avoids the English capital, or at least as far as is compatible with still discussing Cymbeline and some minor bits of Milton. For the most part it shifts its formidably ...”

“... ambitious and extensive elaboration in Dante. William Empson has a whole dazzling paragraph on George Herbert’s line ‘Man stole the fruit but I must climb the tree,’ including these sentences: He [Christ] climbs the tree to repay what was stolen, as if he was putting the apple back; but the phrase in itself implies rather that he is doing the ...”

“... days: in doing so, they also throw a good deal of unintentional light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...”

“... walked and sung! Others who liked to think of Shakespeare as Nature’s darling boy included George Romney, who from the 1760s painted a series of variations on the theme of The Infant Shakespeare Nursed by Tragedy and Comedy and Nature Unveiling Herself to the Infant Shakespeare, culminating in The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions ...”

“... London at weekends in donkey jackets and Doc Martens: ‘I heard some people say it was Doing-The-George-Orwell-Thing.’ (The intolerance of other styles, the quick, slick condemnations are among the worst characteristics of public schoolboys.) With Etonians, says Watkins, ‘there was no grey zone. You either were or you weren’t. It was as clear as the ...”

“... an implausible imagining’, and to adduce chapter and verse for Emma’s reading of ‘Balzac and George Sand’. Of course it’s not an implausible imagining. When Prendergast later tells us that part of his discussion of Les Misérables has been ‘wilfully flippant’, I had to turn back and scour the previous pages for anything that looked like ...”

“... now, even when he is not aiming for the grotesque – as if he had abandoned Wilde for George Eliot but had found only C. P. Snow. Martha, for example, one of the archaeologists, is a large and ‘deceptively jolly’ woman who manages to sound pleasant and cheerful while sowing discreet seeds of discord all over the place. This is an interesting ...”

“... Administrations, and now it seems that the necessary technology may soon be within reach. George W. Bush wants to push ahead with the scheme, and has committed the US to constructing a National Missile Defense system, at a cost of more than $60 billion. A successful test was carried out in July. Canada’s co-operation is essential if the system is to ...”

“... does anyone steadily see what we do to each other all the time? This is Cavell’s version of what George Eliot once called ‘the fact of frequency’. Do we ‘recognise what we are capable of in the undramatic, repetitive, daily confrontations’ to which these more visible stories call attention? If we do, we shall see that in our slights of one ...”

“... nightmare, and somebody, Vidal thinks, forged Arthur Bremer’s diary before the shooting of George Wallace. Vidal’s analysis of the diary is masterly, and his tone is mocking, lucid, light. There is nothing quite as good as the Hunt essay in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star either, although one or two pieces come close, and the rest are ...”

“... white society, in the form of two record producers named after 19th-century Indian fighters: George Wright and Phil ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ Sheridan. Alexie’s first books were at times reckless with detail but they were also energetic portrayals of a largely unfamiliar culture; and racial antagonism was only one aspect of his ...”