“... Thomas’s notion was that if you looked after the sound it didn’t matter whether the sense took care of itself; that it was possible to write great poems without worrying too much what they meant. The pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense that one day one will be able to work it ...”

“... famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in India took place under British rule in Bengal in 1943, exacerbated by Churchill’s insistence that the grain must go to the troops and not to the people who grew it. Tharoor quotes Amartya Sen’s memorable dictum that there has never been a famine in a democracy with ...”

“... it: Everybody in South Carolina knew that blacks, for reasons unknown, fancied clay … The eating took place in a bedroom, for the galvanised bucket of clay was kept under the bed, for the cool. It was blue clay from a creek, the consistency of slightly gritty ice cream. It lay smooth and delicious-looking in its pail of clear water. You scooped it out and ...”

“... cloak) he would preach vigorously.’ (He also loved a game called mesmerism, in which he took the part of the victim.) Cummie almost certainly provoked the terrors that only she could soothe, but Louis was addicted like a Covenanter to her hellfire images, and without her care felt that he might have died in Heriot Row. ‘How well I remember her ...”

“... feet away. Before the hood was placed over Gilmore’s head, the man walked over to the chair, and took both of the killer’s hands into his own. ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ he said. Gilmore looked up, and replied sweetly: ‘You’re going to help me escape.’ The man’s name was Lawrence Schiller. And he did help Gilmore escape: he ...”

“... the stories were so smuttily school-boyish: in those days, saying rude words in front of nanny took a lot of nerve. Shit features quite a lot in Mortmere – as it does, curiously enough, in An Unmentionable Man. When samples of Mortmere reached Oxford, the court of Auden was spellbound. Stephen Spender later on recalled that ‘just as Auden seemed to us ...”

“... children to play with their son and daughter. For reasons that never quite emerge Bernstein later took up again what he somewhat grandiloquently calls ‘the project’. Loyalties – bearing the subtitle ‘a son’s memoir’ – is the result. It is a transparently sentimental book, and a slightly uncomfortable one. To his credit, Bernstein does not seek ...”

“... some came to be treated virtually as stewards and found themselves entrusted with duties that took them far beyond the bounds of the gentle little worlds in which they would otherwise have expected to spend their lives. The elder Tradescant was just such a man. By 1610, when he first comes into certain view (apart from the record of his marriage), in the ...”

“... his sopranos, Shaw something little short of a compulsion to fall in love with, first, women who took singing lessons from his mother and then, after he turned dramatist, his actresses. This must be one of the hazards of creating works of art that need executants to perform them. Ordinary lovers are sometimes dismayed to find that their beloved is in effect ...”

“... remembered it now) and for which she had searched for years. No one had been able to find it. She took it as a priceless relic and kissed it.’ Dan Jacobson’s tone is cooler but just as intent: ‘nothing is more mysterious to us than the processes which suddenly present to our awareness a long-forgotten face or phrase from childhood.’ And there are ...”

“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No doubt it was a diminuendo devoutly to be wished. Johnson is not indefatigable ...”

“... should be temporarily garrisoned by the Chinese and British armies. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang took the North and the British under General Gracey occupied the South. In a little known and not very creditable episode, Gracey’s men released the Japanese soldiers and used them to hold down the locals until the French returned. I once asked Vietnam’s ...”

“... required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch. At first, these static motion pictures were known around the Factory as ‘stillies’. Eventually, they would be called Screen Tests. In the first instalment of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s cinema, Callie ...”

“... sticks he was eating on his diet, so he closed the fridge door and went outside to the garage. He took his double-barrelled shotgun down from the shelf, took four shells from a box and put them in his bath-robe pocket. Then he walked back into the house, entered the bedroom of his old nanny, Mary, still holding the ...”