“... is, God alone knows. I couldn’t trace it in Lloyd’s Register, but it may have been renamed. At best, ships live half as long as humans, and it would now be 38 years old. I was at its launch in October 1956: the photo shows me in school cap and muffler, with Great-Uncle Alex and Great-Aunt Jean, Cousin Jean, two small Canadian girls, their father and their ...”

“... setting of a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell, unconnected with the famous river) is almost its best-known feature. But jazz idioms crop up all over the place, sometimes as no more than crisp, syncopated rhythms, sometimes as harmonic suggestions. Now and then the music gets bogged down in figurings of this kind; at least as often it is energised by ...”

“... This year Germany’s growth rate is set to be 4.5 per cent. Britain’s will be 1 per cent. Nicholas Ridley’s embarrassing outburst about the German threat has only served to underline that there is now no doubt which is the model, and which the retard. The fizzling-out of the Thatcher ‘miracle’ is a good time to reflect on the conditions of ...”

“... history – as well as the longest entry in Britain’s Who’s Who. Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Prince of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900, the second son of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria. His father, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and son of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had joined the British Navy in ...”

“... first danger. The second danger, they protest, does not exist. Or rather, if it does exist, it is best not to mention it. Security service bosses, they tell us, have been agents of the enemy. The first difficulty here is that enemies change. From 1940 to 1945, for instance, the enemy was Germany, Italy and (to a slightly lesser degree) Fascism. Russia ...”

“... republics. Where nationalist trends were already evident, as in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks did their best to embed them in the Soviet (as opposed to a ‘bourgeois’) framework provided in this case by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Where they were more or less absent, as in Belorussia, a republican territory was allocated anyway and efforts were made ...”

“... But politicians weren’t blameless. ‘All prime ministers love intelligence,’ the diplomat Nicholas Henderson claimed: it allows them to believe that they have a ‘direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have’. At the beginning it all looked innocent enough. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley ...”

“... bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness. His upper-class snobs, perverts, tyrants, addicts and solipsists speak aphoristically, amusingly, cleverly, disdainfully; and the high polish of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost ...”

“... of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do their best to reform themselves, because monastic life is always prone to lapse into unheroic comfort and modified austerity. A more radical critique emerged at the end of the 12th century, with a great proliferation of new and distinctive communities called ...”

“... or even to civilise war has been more rewarding. This jus in bello is the topic of Geoffrey Best’s fascinating book, a volume replete with scholarship and brilliant presentation. Moderate or civilised wars can only operate within certain limitations. They are almost impossible when there is a conflict of creeds as well as of state power. The wars of ...”

“... even if they water down, the more acute trials the state afflicts in adolescence, when your Best Friend of one day can speedily disown, his hostility armed with a full knowledge of your weak points, gleaned during the period of your intimacy. No wonder experts on the subject lay far greater stress on loyalty in friendship than in love, or even in ...”

“... of tall travellers’ tales from Swift and Voltaire to Lewis Carroll and Samuel Butler. Professor Nicholas Caritat, unworldly scholar of the Enlightenment, is forced out of Militaria, his savagely autocratic homeland, and sent off by an improbable plot device in pursuit of the best of all possible societies. His first port ...”

“... contempt for the Egyptians. I felt high. I had just been reading War and Peace and recognised Nicholas Rostov’s exhilaration before the battle of Austerlitz. The bus crept downhill into the unpaved lanes south of Pyramids Street. They were choked with vehicles coming off the main road where the action was. There was a lot of backing, advancing and ...”

“... the least resistance was found, like nuclear dumps today. But among stations that made the best of this now desirable isolation from the buzz of the world I recall a country restaurant which survived for many years in the Good Food Guide in spite of a correspondent’s happy description: ‘Mr Johnson is in the bar, and by the end of the evening the ...”

“... to the result. She thus succeeded one of Europe’s outstanding politiclowns, the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. Normally garbed in tartanic garments designed by his own hand and inhabiting a nearby castle, Sir Nicholas had been famously critical of the SNP’s open-door citizenship policy which would, for ...”