“... stagecraft and of her dialogue diction from Shakespeare, a dramatic ancestry that was audible in David Buxton’s 1978 production of The Rover at Colchester. Ms Goreau’s feminist dogma rests, however, on the manifestly false assumption, which is at the same time bitterly insulting to women, that no woman possesses imagination enough to identify herself ...”

“... but these attacks ought not to be forgotten. They are what this country is capable of. The poet David Holbrook said that the Beatles were talentless, and that their music, and the dancing that went with it, were ‘a low form of masturbation’. This was in a letter of 1964 to the New Statesman, the people’s friend, where Paul Johnson had proclaimed that ...”

“... Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872, when he was 27, and while he was a Professor of Classics at Basel. It had the unusual effect, for him, of attracting some attention at the time of its appearance: after that, Nietzsche’s writings virtually ceased to be noticed until the 1890s, by which time he was, for the last 11 years of his life, insane, virtually without speech, and out of touch with the world ...”

“... did not edit the Bannatyne Manuscript. It was edited by his colleague in the Court of Session, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, whose Annals led Sir Walter Scott to laud him as ‘the restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It ...”

“... who all along decried the rumours of a rocket attack as ‘a mare’s nest’ (thus giving David Irving the title for a book) and said of Sir Stafford Cripps, who took the threat seriously: ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ Even when it was indubitably clear what was on the way, Cherwell fell back to arguing that the ...”

“... using all manner of natural light sources, from oscilloscopes to bonfires, filming at 8 f.p.s. (on the oscilloscope) to get an exposure and asking the actors to move at half-speed, pushing emulsion further and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers ...”

“... most powerful man in the country. Judgments on him tended to be harsh. One British agent, Colonel David Smiley, wrote that Shehu ‘boasted’ of having personally slit the throats of 70 Italian prisoners during the war. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Tito had told him that Shehu had strangled his predecessor as Minister of the Interior, Koci ...”

“... from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels – whose ...”

“... but have won the respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... P.H. Matthews, Sven Jacobson, M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid ...”

“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...”

“... of which three-quarters are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised ...”

“... prejudice against their French allies led to the folly of the Battle of Loos in September 1915. David French, on the other hand, explains how the responsibility for another great disaster, the third Battle of Ypres, was subsequently blamed on the French by Haig and Lloyd George, who ‘agreed to launch the Flanders offensive in the full knowledge that ...”

“... all separate in our bodies, all nobody to each other and everything to ourselves.’ Readers of David Plante’s novels may recognise this brand of solipsism, half stricken, half thrilled. It would be untrue to say that the conviction of solitariness goes untested in the course of the book, but by the end it has been vindicated at least as much as argued ...”