“... entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades. The panzergrenadiers had been informed that Oradour was a hotbed of Resistance activity and were seeking revenge for the abduction nearby, on ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... its licence fee income of £3.8 billion is either too much or not enough. In a world dominated by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, it’s ever harder for the BBC to keep up. It is estimated that Netflix alone will have spent upwards of $12 billion on content in 2018. It has a global audience of more than 130 million, a figure that is increasing ...”

“... tells us more about Heaney’s poetic aims than about Mahon’s experiments – so was he piqued by Heaney’s habit of characterising what he admired in others in self-descriptive terms? Or did ‘dividend from ourselves’ and ‘high yields’ trigger resentment at Heaney’s financial security, now that his Nobel Prize ‘doubloons’, as he called ...”

“... is led to a vision of crystalline purity. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs, each of which is independent of every other, are configurations of objects. These objects would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been ...”

“... to find some way of coming to terms with such a rich and extensive body of work, all of it marked by Berger’s unflagging seriousness, his insistence on somehow merging personal response, social insight, aesthetic theory and political commentary. Every piece is rigorously thought through but also heartfelt, sometimes almost embarrassingly so.Berger’s ...”

“... a memorandum which George Young circulated among his admiring agents in the mid-Fifties. It starts by castigating the ‘ceaseless talk’ about the ‘spread of democratic processes’. ‘The reality,’ it went on, ‘is quite the opposite.’ There then followed this illuminating passage: The nuclear stalemate is matched ...”

“... between these two leaks? In 1983, a young civil servant at the Ministry of Defence was so outraged by her Secretary of State’s plans to head off a demonstration against Cruise missiles that she copied the relevant document and delivered it in an anonymous envelope to the Guardian newspaper. In 1986, if Bernard Ingham’s book is to ...”

“... policy from 1900 to 1945. A major source of such material was, of course, the speeches delivered by leading Labour politicians in the House of Commons. So one of my tasks was to wade through Hansard for the entire period, looking for significant utterances which could be held either to have changed Labour Party policy or ...”

“... brisk notes made of Paris nightlife at the turn of the century, and then our attention is arrested by six drawings which include no topical reference at all. They represent a female nude kneeling, facing a larger, shadowy, seated figure of indeterminate sex between whose legs her head is placed. A seventh drawing shows the kneeling girl alone. The ...”

“... the Arab world and in Iran that US foreign policy towards the Middle Last is a conspiracy devised by the American Jewish lobby. It has long been accepted in Europe that the Arabs and Iranians, although prone to exaggeration, had a legitimate grievance about Washington’s automatic bias in favour of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower. The recent Middle ...”

“... or at the very least, ‘interesting if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is ...”

“... and there is a sort of Roedean hoydenishness about her which I dislike.’ I did not dislike her by the end of the book, but it comes as a surprise to be writing a review which, in effect, tries to defend Nancy Mitford’s reputation not against her detractors but against her defenders. At the wish of her sister and ...”

“... in my experience, pays the mortgage and feeds young mouths more than writing novels does. But to be invited by a publisher to write one is, of course, immensely flattering. ‘I’d want a great deal of money,’ I said. ‘How much?’ she asked, her eyes beginning to focus. I named a preposterous figure. ‘That’s ...”

“... the events it describes, but it is common enough for politicians to serve present purposes by rearranging light and shade on the historical picture. Christopher Addison, for example, published an edited version of his war diaries in 1934, just as he was trying to cut a figure as a Labour frontbencher. The originals had recorded the private thoughts of ...”