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“... it appeared instantly and has never lost its hold. To call something a ‘genocide’ similarly means to define it as an act of maximum destructiveness and culpability. Hence the sardonic appeal of a locution like ‘ethnic cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an ...”

“... ideas of an author who, though no philosopher, was at least a consistent moralist. This is by no means a hasty or ill-considered Life, however. For the most part, Scott moves around the monument circumspectly, picking her way through the hints and half-sightings, as wary of friendly reports as of the sneerers, and assembles the ‘consistent fiction’ she ...”

“... Third Reich and later offenders of a quite different kind. Dehler’s successor called the law a means of ‘making a break with crimes directly or indirectly connected with circumstances prevailing in a chaotic period’, some of the most weaselly words in a book that quotes many. The obfuscation at work in both laws makes it hard to determine how many Nazi ...”

“... Efficiency is intended to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget. But it also putatively means placing the power to hire and fire in the hands of the world’s richest man. You do not need to have a massively bloated government in order to operate a spoils system, as 19th-century politicians understood. All you need is an unaccountable government. In ...”

“... to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up ...”

“... A young Englishman of means passing through Rome on the Grand Tour in the mid to late 1700s might well have been directed to the studio of Pompeo Batoni to have his portrait painted. It would probably only have taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual ...”

“... shutters put up at the Colosseum’. If a rider’s scoreboard light is on at Signpost Corner, it means he’s only a mile short of the finish line. The expression is also used of someone nearing the end of their life. His subtitle is ‘Memoirs of the Movies, among other Matters’, which has a certain Old English alliterative charm. The memoirs of the ...”

“... encounter Medieval Latin poetry, if at all, only on record sleeves. For them Carmina Burana means the awful Orff. In his Preface Peter Godman speaks of his ‘solitary task’ writing a book on Carolingian poetry ‘in this damp island off the coast of Europe’; and the preponderance of German names in his notes and bibliography bears out the ...”

“... They worked for these things obliquely, discreetly and without any Leninist clarity about the means.’ Thatcher later came to see it as ‘treachery – with a smile on its face’. That is almost certainly not the way they saw it, though many of them felt profoundly guilty about what they were doing. It was, in their own minds, merely how the game ...”

“... think that they could get a good picture of my life from these pages; but it is not so.’ David Newsome, invited and challenged, has entered the labyrinth, drawing the rest of us with him into an implacable game initiated by the diarist. The mirrors and images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”

“... playing at home breeds a sense of solidarity, or what used to be called team spirit, which means that players have more confidence in each other and work better as a unit. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happens. But Moskowitz and Wertheim haven’t proved that it doesn’t. The key figure that they don’t really discuss is the disparity ...”

“... form of wit which is less a statement about the world than an indirect expression of character by means of sheer nagging insistence – came naturally to Sturges. He sometimes caught himself at it. ‘Money? My God, I earned so much money, so much that it seemed unimportant to me and I came to pooh-pooh it … the last thing in the world one should ...”

“... vantage-point, can decipher. But, says Kierkegaard, that leaves out of account precisely what it means to live in the world. It leaves out of account the choices men always have to make without any knowledge of ends, and it leaves out of account the directions not taken, relegating to darkness those who have made the wrong choices or the choices not condoned ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”