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“... respectfully plinthed in gallery or plaza; or a curvaceous wooden form strung like a harp which we gaze at in dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”

“... a world without CIA torture sites in Poland, Lithuania and Romania, but that isn’t the world we live in. In the Anglosphere, Nato’s history remains bound up with a mythology of the Second World War that ascribes victory to Anglo-American co-operation. The conditions for the creation of the alliance were established by Britain’s survival in 1940 and ...”

“... itself for language, which never really captures it and ultimately cheats the experience. We are always referring our experience to something else as in “this reminds me of ...” There’s a sense of hardly ever living in the present, and this kind of nostalgia comes through in the writing.’ Here Shepard is touching on the central alertness ...”

“... literary critics’ valorisation of tradition’. This phrase occurs towards the end of W.J. McCormack’s dissection of Anglo-Irishness as a literary and historical concept, Ascendancy and Tradition. ‘Valorise’, indeed, is a verb much favoured in this book, along with others like ‘energise’ and ‘traumatise’. There’s a word that might ...”

“... all culminating in ‘Commencement’, the graduation ceremonies for the Class of 1986. We were, to be sure, an interesting class, the first one to graduate in the Kennedy years, a transitional period between Eisenhower conservatism and the anti-Vietnam War militancy that traumatised Harvard and other universities in the late Sixties. In the 1960 ...”

“... as Bidault learned to his horror, was calmly assuming that Valeri, the Papal Nuncio and former dean of the Vichy diplomatic corps would remain in place under the new regime: he would merely be extending the ritual New Year greetings to de Gaulle rather than Pétain. Valeri was blackballed and had to be replaced by an angry Vatican with Mgr Roncalli (later ...”

“... magically returned, and he shouted for another, thinking: the thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but half-way through it the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a ...”

“... he was 66, a suicide planned with the same elaborate care with which he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... experience a jolt when they are told that Adam Smith was not an economist. Rather, as we know from his body of work and from the chance survival of lecture notes taken by his students, he was a moral philosopher and analyst of statecraft for whom The Wealth of Nations was only one – albeit crucial – component in a broader science of ...”

“... much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing Street after serving ...”

“... decidedly unglamorous living as vicar of Doncaster. The highest he was to reach in the Church was Dean of Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington Symonds, a pupil at Harrow at that time, which were not published till the 1960s. There, a simple tale of ...”

“... arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been, shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom. Halo is basically the story of a super-soldier who is fighting a theocratic nightmare called the Covenant, with the person at the video console, if he is skilful enough, framed as ...”

“... problems – Galtieri’s junta decided to force the issue. The invasion started on 2 April. We know what the British government’s response to that was: the Task Force; ‘Rejoice!’ (Thatcher’s order to the nation when South Georgia was recaptured); Goose Green; and the eventual Argentinian surrender on 14 June. All this took Galtieri by ...”