“... meanness and despair and everything that tries to drag us under. An ailing husband or modern King David goes off for a last restorative fling with an accommodating Bathsheba. ‘Don’t come back grouchy,’ says the wife. Other writers’ women would have broken pots. On learning of the death of her son, a mother sleeps well for the first time in two ...”

“... cover of each diary were the plastic initials AH, except where he ran out of A’s and had to put F’s instead. He did this on the volume illustrated on its front cover by Stern on the day when the magazine finally launched on the world the greatest scoop of all time, Fred Hitler’s diary. The diaries were mostly copied, not always accurately, from dry ...”

“... 17th century the same international concerns produced the Evangelical Union, the eirenicism of David Pareus, and the disastrous attempt, which provoked the Thirty Years War, to annex Bohemia for the reformed cause. In the next generation they produced the globe-trotting ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly ...”

“... proceedings. The Young Spartans is a history painting – it links him directly with Ingres and David – yet the bodies it shows are adolescent, as surely modern children as the rats who later became his models. It challenges the convention of the well-formed statuesque body as the vehicle for the characters of history. When he painted a carriage at the ...”

“... are besieged by customers overweight in their baggage, who are taking back washing-machines, hi-fi, fridges and televisions. Ugandan shops are quite well stocked with imported goods, so that Kenyans, who find it harder to get them, cross the border to buy. Behind high fences, dogs, and armed askaris (you hear gunfire every night in the centre of ...”

“... that a positive Greiss test had only one meaning: contact with nitroglycerine. Since the trial, Mr David Bal-dock, former head of the Home Office forensic laboratories at Nottingham, carried out exactly the same test on a series of quite different substances – on nitrocellulose lacquer, for instance, on nitrocellulose chips and nitrocellulose aerosol ...”

“... I adore war,’ Julian Grenfell reported to his mother from the Flemish trenches in 1914, in a letter which she proudly sent on for anonymous publication in the Times. Stalking Germans through the mud was not very different from stalking partridges, as he noted in his game book: ‘November 16th; 1 Pomeranian. November 17th; 2 Pomeranians.’ Two decades later in Spain, Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was ‘perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society ...”

“... defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most serious result of the under-representation of secondary education on the ...”

“... hero’s refusal to meet his mother at a victory dinner; the arm’s-length relations with his son David, whom he temporarily disinherited after his divorce (the first in the family); the decision to cut his brother Brian’s wedding and go to a football match instead; and other incidents showing a perverse insensitivity. The Princesse de Merode, whose chateau ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... He is right about that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and ...”

“... and it is the hanging together that matters, not whether there were real people called Moses and David, who may or may not have done this or that. Of course the patterns and fulfilments of the old interpreters were different from Leach’s; the resemblance lies only in that they are concealed, and require to be detected by elaborate methods of ...”

“... The passages of invective follow handsomely the tradition of Scots flytings: They ar pang-fu o aa kin a wrang-daein, wickitness, greed, malice; invyfu, bluid-thristie, canglesome, sleekie, ill-hairtit, sae as they coudna be mair; clash-pyats, ill-speakers; hatesome tae God, bangsters, scorners, sprosers, drauchtie, camstairie wi their paurents; dull i ...”

“... Rutherford was one of my early heroes, and Wilson’s biography of this great and lovable man has enlivened and enlarged, rather than debunked, my youthful image. Rutherford was the man who created the atomic age: a farmer’s boy from New Zealand whose brilliance and Herculean energy brought him the Presidency of the Royal Society, a peerage, and honours from all over the world ...”