“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a box at the Paris Opera during a performance of The Barber of Seville, and chose to throw away his major pieces one by one, finishing with the most elegant mate imaginable. In ...”

“... of US Forces in Nato, invited Zuckerman for a drink, and said: ‘We have painted ourselves into a corner. How do we get out of it?’ It isn’t clear that Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very ...”

“... store, picking out a little natural law theory from Aquinas, some Roman materials from a dark corner at the back; he then resold the resulting bricolage under the label ‘classical’ (as Vermeule himself has conceded, ‘law being messy, it is always possible to find some material or other to support a thesis’). He insisted that his thesis about ...”

“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”

“... or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself. The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy and ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. ‘Two and six,’ Brecht replies, a Lyons Corner House or something (and at the time the multi-millionaire Zweig was residing in Portland Place), and then it’s straight back to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family ...”

“... of her reports from Chechnya have been published in English – A Dirty War (2001) and A Small Corner of Hell (2003); they were followed by Putin’s Russia (2004) and A Russian Diary (2007), which give an acerbic account of Russia’s domestic scene (though here too the war in Chechnya is never far from the surface). Nothing but the Truth is based on a ...”

“... clappy’ evangelical meetings in church halls. Helen remembers her parents going round the corner to the neighbour’s house to watch the TV news that summer. On 12 August 1969 the Battle of the Bogside began in Derry and trouble soon spread to Belfast. Nationalists rioted and attacked the police, while loyalists burned Catholics out of their homes. In ...”

“... laps at the New Orleans Athletic Club, and nightly Brandy Alexanders at Victor’s around the corner. But mortality was the thing that drove him. ‘Without that idea of imminent death,’ he remarked, ‘I doubt that I could have created Blanche DuBois.’ Throughout his life Williams insisted that he worked every day, by which he meant every day, seven ...”

“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”

“... for not ignoble victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age’. As with St Paul, hate and love of the persecuted were closely bound up. Symonds speaks of the personal misery flowing from the Vaughan affair in striking vocabulary: ‘It was a severe strain upon my nervous and moral strength – this probing of Vaughan’s case, this ...”