“... talked about, and Nick Carraway, Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, come to New York from the Middle West, can both identify with Gatsby as a figure of mystery and charm, and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, has the engaging ...”

“... born, Jewish, Cambridge-educated, critically middle-aged etc), lecturer at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands, is discovered begowned (it being graduation day) screwing a begowned finalist on his office floor. It is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an ...”

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...”

“... butler, an imposing Wodehousian figure, became an attraction in his own right, while at West Wycombe the châtelaine Helen Dashwood, known, not especially affectionately, as ‘hell-bags’, made her disdain for hoi polloi plain as she shooed them from room to room. Throughout these years, Lees-Milne remained ambivalent about everything in his life ...”

“... secret war it has conducted against the Palestinians, especially following the occupation of the West Bank and Sinai in 1967. It shows how Aman, the Shin Bet and Mossad, while maintaining their prewar functions, greatly expanded their regular activities to meet the security requirements of Greater Israel. Aman retained its overall responsibility for national ...”

“... the biggest prig of all. When trying to adapt socialism to the affluent society of the late 1950s, Anthony Crosland had little time for this puritanical earnestness: ‘Total abstinence,’ he observed, ‘and a good filing system are not now the right signposts to the socialist Utopia.’ In at least two ways, however, Crosland’s put-down of the Webbs ...”

“... illegally seized power in 1965. Britain did not identify with the East Timorese or the people of West Sahara when they were taken over by the Indonesians and Moroccans in 1975 – even though 50,000 Timorese died in a genocidal disaster defending the same right that Britain claims for the Falklanders. Nor was much democratic nonsense heard about rights of ...”

“... just about possible.Ashton went back to Egypt at the request of the US to help signal that the West stood united in favour of the military takeover. She was one of only a tiny number of people to visit Morsi while he was detained in a secret prison on Abu Qir naval base. Her account of the meeting is stunning. Having been flown by military helicopter, at ...”

“... modernism of the interwar years, as introduced by émigrés from fascist Germany, is inner North-West London: the borough of Camden, and to a lesser extent Westminster, Barnet and Brent, with Hampstead and Highgate at the epicentre. It is here that you can find the major buildings of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, the houses of Connell, Ward and ...”

“... the behaviour and aspirations that Lüthy had deemed irrational. One could then go back to the West, and see many similarities before the arrival of Machiavelli, the first Western political philosopher to exclude anything ‘divine’ or ‘magical’ from his thinking. The irony was that Bloom and Moertono, on the same campus at the same time, were ...”

“... is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish ...”

“... artists or canonical masterpieces’. There can be no room in such a project for artists such as Anthony Devis, adjudged by Waterhouse to be ‘an altogether minor person’; or those whom it is ‘sufficient to mention’ but unnecessary to discuss; or the numerous and nameless ‘journeymen hacks’ who ‘cannot find a place in a general history of ...”

“... come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking on which he was engaged. Eden insisted that he had had no direct foreknowledge of Israeli intentions; he was able to respond decisively, he said, only because he had ...”

“... radical idea of abolishing public schools. It is possible to explain the absence throughout the West of any militantly radical newspaper of national importance by the relatively small number of people who believe in such ideas: it is much harder to account for the fact that there is no paper in Britain which supports the Labour Party in the way that the ...”

“... of guts in Alien. Seriousness is not an index of greatness, however: Watteau is greater than West, and the power of Bacon’s images is not diminished by these comparisons. From his answers to questions about his way of working, a model can be constructed of a process of controlled spontaneity, of marks made with unpremeditated directness and urgency to ...”