“... When​ family and friends of Christopher Hitchens periodically tried to persuade him to temper his unhealthy lifestyle, they used to point out how awful it would be if Henry Kissinger outlived him. Hitchens spent years pursuing Kissinger in print – and sometimes in person – for his assorted war crimes. He wanted to see him prosecuted at The Hague ...”

“... the masses had only been waiting for a signal to pour into the streets and head for the palaces. Christopher Clark uses a metaphor from nuclear physics for the way the revolution accelerated: From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission ...”

“... her, who had been in prison far longer than she had, and who told her that ‘if a tame little white girl from the suburbs’ could be wrongly convicted, ‘maybe people would finally start paying attention.’ She began speaking publicly about her experience, criss-crossing the country ‘to tell my story, raise awareness, and help fundraise’ for local ...”

“... were established to promote creationism. But it was during Carter’s unhappy term in the White House that Jerry Falwell and others built the national political organisations that were to become the vehicles of the religious right. When Reagan was elected in November 1980, the long exile of evangelicals from Washington had come to an end. It would be ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems to ...”

“... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of course, but rather joylessly: the ...”

“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and ...”

“... the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able ...”

“... himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical master in this journal for speaking ‘with the direct personal commitment ...”

“... society. Densely populated with characters major and minor, and echoing with the table-talk at White’s and the Turf, the Colville diaries are a unique record of a governing class still functioning with superb aplomb in the midst of the People’s War. To Colville, the small world of the pre-war ruling circle was home, and he wrote in his diaries as ...”

“... 11. Isherwood and Don come for dinner. 15. Dinner with Gerald [Heard]. 16. Lunch with Christopher Isherwood and Don at MGM Studios. 17. Bob [Craft] records Gesualdo 2 to 5. 19. Aaron Copland for dinner. 22. Bob records. 24. For dinner here: Isherwood and Don. 29. Lunch at Bel Air. The whole day with Robert Graff (NBC Television): I am going ...”

“... names and lived to the age of 99. Another who tangled with Bolsheviks, defeating a plot to seize a White Russian submarine and kill its officers, including himself, was Wilfred Dunderdale, better known for his part in smuggling the Enigma encoding machine from Poland in Hitler’s war. In later years, since he disliked the Whitehall atmosphere of MI6, this ...”

“... drunk at the same fountains long before,’ Leigh Fermor explains. In Classics Transformed (1998), Christopher Stray reveals (citing a letter from Leigh Fermor) that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel ...”

“... who produced masterpieces of late 16th-century Catholic piety were drunkards: the publisher Christopher Plantin told a Spanish client that the brothers only worked long enough to accumulate sufficient funds to vanish into Antwerp’s taverns, from where Plantin, who depended on their remarkable talents, would extract them, pay their bills and retrieve ...”