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“... 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 ...”

“... solved: how to keep busy, avoid trouble, stay happy and remain hopeful, while fretting away the best years of their lives waiting for the monarch to die. Thus regarded, Prince Charles’s present predicament is no exception to this general royal rule. On the contrary, it is very familiar. For all its privileges of rank and wealth, being heir to the British ...”

“... our historical understanding, and unless it can be met, the study of English iconoclasm will be at best half a success. Those who, fashionably, lament the destruction of images on artistic grounds do not know how lucky they are to look at an image and be able to see only a picture or a statue: they have no need to grapple with the power an image enjoyed in the ...”

“... his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the Mind retrieves his best work from the margin of literature I will suggest why The City of Dreadful Night was mislaid there. Its settled gloom is only part of the explanation. Dante’s Inferno, though gloomier than the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is more popular. Thomson’s inferno ...”

“... so martyrdom in the primitive Church was prima facie evidence of sanctity. It was also one of the best recruiting tools the new religion had, for the impressive liturgies, the great cathedrals and the dazzling intellectual achievements came later. But the authentic Acts of the Martyrs are sober documents, and do not linger over accounts of torture any more ...”