“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...”

“... of ‘one life, one writing’, although not at all in the proudly psychopathic sense in which Robert Lowell threw off that phrase. Few writers can have been less disturbed in the psyche than Mrs Gaskell, and the fact suggests the uncomfortable old cliché that virtue and good writing hardly ever go together. With her heart in the right place she wrote ...”

“... by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving sexuality enters the texture of his work: at the time of the ...”

“... raised. She might conceivably have had better luck if she hadn’t pulled her act on the day that Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. When Ultra Violet asked Andy the stupid question ‘Why were you the one to get shot?’ he replied brilliantly: ‘I was in the wrong place at the right time.’ This ad-man’s gift for tags and phrases, perhaps honed ...”

“... on one of the compendious alibis put forward in extenuation of Eden by his faithful biographer, Robert Rhodes James. Why, then, by 1951, had Lloyd risen so high in the Conservative Party, to which he had only finally committed himself as late as 1944? One explanation is that he had a good war behind him. He was one of the ‘Tory Brigadiers’ elected in ...”

“... happened to bump into’ (and the confusions of fiction and reality are not helped when Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a source for the figure of Charlus, turns up as ‘Montesquieu’). Nabokov is more interestingly considered, on the subject of cruelty: more interestingly, because there is here, more than in other parts of the book, a sense of felt ...”

“... Colonel van Ormer has a forceful personality,’ lamented Brigadier Lushington, head of the British Services Mission in Iraq, of his new American colleague in October 1954. ‘I suspect that he has been “hand-picked”. If he is to be believed, he is being given a very free hand indeed. He talks very big.’ The aggrieved brigadier, charged with managing the operational end of what had been, since the creation of the state of Iraq at the conclusion of the First World War, an exclusive relationship between Britain and the Iraqi Armed Forces, was not disposed to ‘belittle the seriousness of this American invasion ...”

“... Europe’s greatest asset. It needed great architects at the first hour, men like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. It now needs bricklayers. Bricklayers have, I suspect, always been more respected in Britain than architects. For architects one goes abroad. To Europe, as we used to ...”

“... Like other beliefs and forms of behaviour to be met with in this country in the course of the present century, much of the Thatcherite approach to social policy was imported from the United States. Joe Rogaly commented recently that if under Mrs Thatcher 10 Downing Street was attached ‘by threads of steel’ to right-wing think tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies, the latter were attached ‘by underwater cable’ to their counterparts in New York and Washington ...”

“... been’ warns us of the horrifying slaughter to come, in which Henry’s friends Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro), who has masterminded the robbery, and his mate Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), whack all their associates in the crime except Henry (who’s crucial to a drug operation they profit by). Hill’s narration, during a sequence in which the camera ...”

“... socialism of James Connolly, two of the 16 who, along with MacBride, were executed in 1916. Robert Wohl in his book The Generation of 1914 writes about the vogue of martial mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the fate of that generation, but also ...”

“... and which is not perhaps particularly desirable anyway – imperfection (if we are to believe Robert Lowell) being the language of art. Eclecticism would certainly seem to be the language of art, but Fauré’s music, early or late, is just mysteriously there in its purity, whereas the development of Boulez’s music has largely been from a purity ...”

“... Like other tales, ‘Taman’ borrows from the essentials of Gothic without using its atmosphere. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, on the other hand, uses every item in the Gothic book, combining Scottish diablerie with an old Spanish setting of changeless sloth and superstition, a time-warp in which the intruder’s romantic love is desolated by the ...”

“... as her favourite Maryland setting. Novels about inconspicuously good men – Dr Primrose, the Rev. Robert Elsmere, Sorrell Sr – are not much imitated by today’s fashionable writers. But Saint Maybe is told in an artfully off-hand way which teases the reader into close engagement while suggesting that Tyler herself is only just this side of sarcasm. (One of ...”