“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... The two correspondents should have interests in common and should be able to be brutally frank.’ One of his earliest modifications to his epistolary contract with Hale was to suggest that ‘now that there is more communication between us, I feel that I must be frank.’ Spontaneity was a contact sport, and ...”

“... season when the Sabbath came in early, my school was instructed that I had to leave the football field at 3.30. There were plenty of other Jewish boys there – the school was in Brondesbury – but I was the one who bore the brand. Was my father even aware of what a sissy I was constantly being made to look by his beliefs? If he had been, would it have made ...”

“... by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week ...”

“... experience it as strangely empty. Even on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a British field artillery officer looking towards the German trenches could see ‘not a single soldier ... not a movement of any sort’. A British parachutist in combat in 1982 reported: ‘I didn’t really see any Argies properly until they’d started surrendering ...”

“... IV. One of them shows Johann Baptist Eichelsdörfer, the camp commandant, standing amid a field of dead inmates with an odd expression on his face – irritated or peeved. Were Salinger and Fitzgerald there that day? Did they see Eichelsdörfer? We don’t know. But whatever Salinger saw would have helped him to imagine what had happened to the girl ...”

“... stayed back, accidentally, to admire this spectacle. The rugger tryouts had taken the trouble, on-field, during the scrum, to wrestle and hug the earth completely, and by the end of it, to return with an unfaultable cosmetic exterior of dirt, sweat, and plastered hair. Not an inch of clean skin, and on their bodies, uncreased cotton, was to be seen, and, on ...”

“... these terrestrial commitments. In her accompanying letter the comically obtuse Ethel struggled to field Harris’s demands for information about her brother’s intellectual development (‘I wouldn’t have thought Ern was interested in architecture and art as you say,’) but did at least reveal that he was ‘a great reader’ and ‘often used to go to ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... the very top of the pile. Frick had been a senior Bavarian administrator, Ley came from IG Farben, Frank and Goebbels had good university records and ‘would have succeeded in any field or calling’. Hess, Kater notes, would probably have become a professor in Munich, although the author’s earlier remarks about Bavaria ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... of Fiume demonstrated his total unsuitability for any serious role in government, leaving the field open to Mussolini. Ironically, with the triumph of Fascism in 1922, D’Annunzio went into prolonged decline. Mussolini neutralised him by turning him into a public monument and granting his every whim, however extravagant. He was given a title, Prince of ...”

“... the Cold War and whatever measures Washington decided were necessary to prosecute it, as well as a frank admirer of American capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”