“... heroes. More relevant by far would be a comparison with Lukács’s contemporaries, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach and Arnoldo Momigliano, who did more for the survival of the values to which he paid lip-service than it was in his intention or in his power to do. There is no mention of these names in the present biography, which is just as ...”

“... lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style.’ All over today’s Washington there are men – Robert McNamara, William Colby of the CIA, George Ball of the State Department – who have written memoirs and given interviews which try to atone for past crimes and blunders. Kissinger, no doubt, would regard even the smallest exercise in atonement as ...”

“... the spark. And there is a new roll of honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the ...”

“... actions often pass unnoticed. One does notice, and wince, every time James addresses Sir Robert Cecil as ‘my little beagle’, or ‘my little wiffe-waffe’ – Cecil was five feet two or three, apparently malformed, and sensitive about all this. One does not notice that James had enough sense to keep Cecil as first minister until his death. And ...”

“... brawling factions in exile, and chronicles the emergence of the increasingly dominant figure of Robert Mugabe. Meredith’s long account of the Kissinger deal, as the result of which Ian Smith became for the first time committed to black majority rule, must be compared carefully with Kissinger’sown forthcoming narrative in the second volume of his ...”

“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... was an object of suspicion. Over the following years, as he repositioned himself more securely in Robert Walpole’s England, he and Burlington, ‘the architect Earl’, with the gardener William Kent formed the heart of a coterie that made landscape design into an art form with rules, conventions and, for those with eyes to see, quite distinct ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”

“... the Fieldings had known. The foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, organised by Sir Robert Peel, led a decade later to the disbandment of the runners, not so much because there was nothing for them to do, but because, when the magistrates lost their executive powers, the runners didn’t fit into the newly reorganised system of criminal ...”

“... Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives ...”

“... to time old friends with legal troubles were given real or notional freelance assignments. When Robert Poulet – sentenced to death in absentia for his wartime journalism, later a famous Holocaust denier – turned out to have been writing for the magazine under a pseudonym, Leblanc was alarmed. (‘That fucking Hergé,’ he recalled in ...”

“... think of two men: Boris Johnson clowning so effectively towards office, like an idiot emperor from Robert Graves – and David Mills, spirit of place, who knew just when to step ...”

“... couple of rounds, marked by the usual increase in animosity and decline in relevant argument. Robert Irwin, in For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), concludes that it was ‘one of the finest intellectual dogfights of recent decades’. I’m not so sure. Neither comes out of it all that well, with Gellner becoming increasingly ...”

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”