“... and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish ...”

“... of joke the SS would have played on a prisoner lucky enough to be released from a concentration camp, presenting him at the gates with the bill. We ought to know the name of the official who dreamed up this little wheeze so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in ...”

“... of staff by his father, took part in military operations. Mohamed Oufkir, the king’s aide de camp, was chosen to chaperone the crown prince in the field.Oufkir was a key consigliere, a security fanatic and logistics expert who had helped to organise the new army and later rose to the rank of general. He was also a French war hero: after tours in Italy ...”

“... as dearly. He helps explain how someone can be both a tender mother and a merciless concentration-camp guard, or be a just and temperate magistrate and also a chilly, rejecting father. By associating conscientiousness with cleanliness, and by associating both not only with obsessional neurosis but also (as he does elsewhere) with the religious impulse and ...”

“... in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long ...”

“... to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my ...”

“... crimsons’ – part of the Customs compound which, 15 years later, became the classrooms where William Empson taught English during the Sino-Japanese War, encountering his own brigands outside the city walls (as described in the London Review of 5 October 1995). At Mengtze, wedlock all but crumbled. Stella fell out of love, my father into hurt ...”

“... any semblance of Anglican orthodoxy, agreed with the Reverend Charles Kingsley and the Reverend William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, that it was just as ‘noble’ a conception of God that he worked through divinely instituted natural laws as that he used his powers directly to create each species. Four years after the Origin ...”

“... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...”

“... personal maid in the last years of her life, said in Marilyn Monroe – Confidential, written with William Stadiem. Clearly she spotted a fellow traveller in Weatherby. When she went after him – ‘I’ve seen you talk to everyone but me’ – charming him is not what she had in mind, but something more like an exposé of the dirty side of ...”

“... considerable squalor they encounter. It’s a comic portrait filled with love and intelligence and camp, strangely intimate too, even though Bedford, by temperament (and necessity) a somewhat fey Boswell, nowhere makes the amorous nature of their relationship explicit. Yet, as a bequest, none of it amounts to much. If Murphy was a ‘thinker about ...”

“... and sent it on a squawking unhappy journey downstream. Another time we constructed an elaborate camp on a small island in the middle of a pond with a rope drawbridge worked by discarded bell-ropes from the Church.I only learned recently that Cranfield has a unique local history in respect of the moats and ditches which were strung along its length. There ...”

“... Bildt, a founder member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, along with Richard Perle, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich and others. In the UK, the local counterpart has proudly restated his support for the war, though here, no doubt, the corpses were stepped over in pursuit of preferment rather than principle. Spaniards and Italians may have ...”

“... Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he ...”

“... to expand Nato eastwards, despite warnings by seasoned observers from George Kennan to William Burns (now Biden’s director of the CIA) that to do so would aggravate Russian security concerns. The situation escalated in February 2014 with the Washington-backed coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the gradual takeover of the Maidan movement by ...”