“... Tennyson? This distrustfulness turns up strongly again at the end of the book in a piece by John Bayley called ‘Tennyson and the Idea of Decadence’. There is a great deal to be said for Tennyson; he is quite like Gogol; there is a saving lurking humour or fun in the subtext of some dangerously Parnassian places. (This last discovery aids Professor ...”

“... the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have arisen not from a division between court and country ...”

“... and less obvious. One can take seriously the monsignor’s devotion to his favourite saints: St John of the Cross, St Theresa and St Francis de Sales provide him with the counter-part of the Don’s tales of chivalry. He falls asleep, and ‘all that he could remember after he had woken was that he had been climbing a high tree and he had dislodged a ...”

“... like this: ‘Well, who do you think ordered Castro’s assassination – the office boy? It was John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby.’ The CIA has no will of its own, and merely serves the President, so if it was trying to kill Castro then Kennedy must have ordered it. More generally, the evil that the CIA does is no more than the evil of presidents. The ...”

“... came, Rogin believes, in 1981. ‘To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.’ It so fell out that Reagan had already recorded a breezy, upbeat salute to the audience at the Oscar ceremony: ‘the television ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ability ...”

“... we were reminded of what we had known and then forgotten: that it was the birthplace of Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, we were told that the house in which Rhodes was born had been turned into a museum. Since my wife had been born in Rhodesia, and I had grown up in Kimberley, we felt we had no choice in the matter: we had to go and visit it. To grow up in ...”

“... to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John Goode notes in Women Writing that Lawrence is here unwittingly acute about something central to sexist ideology: that ‘woman is an image to be uttered’ – uttered, that is, by other people. One feature of these four books allows them to be discussed ...”

“... me today? A book of virtually nine hundred pages on F.E. Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead, by John Campbell, has appeared on my desk this morning. John Campbell has written first-rate biographies. I even have a vague recollection that F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was once a figure of some political importance, probably ...”

“... pay for a suitable room large enough to accommodate her needs,’ or Gabriel adding, ‘Perhaps John and I should talk it over. See if we can come up with a plan that will please you,’ or (about his model Annie Miller): ‘I merely want to state that I have not seen her since you came to Bath and other than inadvertently will not do so in the ...”

“... less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging ...”

“... the Mercury astronauts: the first Americans to be hurled into space. The names of some of them – John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom – will no doubt sound like the music of a distant drum in the ears of older readers. In order to write about these men, Wolfe has to write also about their wives; about the corps of test pilots from whom most of the ...”

“... harbours and through torpedo nets. Another spectacular display of effective heroism, noted by John Gooch in Mussolini’s War, was the all-out charge of the Savoia Cavalleria, the Italian equivalent of the Life Guards, when 650 mounted men with sabres and pistols broke a Russian infantry regiment some 2000-strong at Izbushenski on 24 August 1942. Sans ...”

“... what could have been his final piece of dance: a rendering, in perfect stillness in his chair, of John Cage’s 4’33”. In LA, a craggy David Hockney sits in a chair surrounded by paintings he has made of other people sitting in chairs, in preparation for his own Royal Academy show. Shot from the side, he clutches his cigarette between his knuckles. Every ...”