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“... offered the first ‘history of my mind’: in modern times Mill and Nietzsche, Collingwood and Russell, Sartre and Quine, all left records of themselves more memorable than anything else written about them. The number of historians who have produced autobiographies of any distinction, on the other hand, is remarkably small. In the 19th century, the ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... were looking at a grave, just covered.By contrast, despite her pleas and those of the C-in-C, Sir John French, it was not until the end of May 1915 that Asquith himself visited the Front – one more indication of how wrong his wife was when she claimed that ‘Henry was born for this war.’ The Brocks​ repeatedly tug our attention to Asquith’s hopeless ...”

“... permanently deadened the capacity for irony among those who took credit for the triumph. Power, as John Adams wrote in a passage Niebuhr cites, always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... a political leader giving the audience a history lesson. In 1967 I went to North Vietnam for the Russell/Sartre war crimes tribunal. That experience seared me for life. Later I joined a team sent by Bertrand Russell to attend Régis Debray’s trial in Camiri as part of an effort to save his life. All this left a mark. But ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... one of Whitman’s explicitly gay love poems. It is easy to imagine F.O. Matthiessen and his lover Russell Cheney reading it in the Twenties. Since they had no role models and no sense of being part of any tradition it was the sort of work which was important for them. Matthiessen wrote: ‘Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us knows a ...”

“... than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... was more interested in writers and artists than clothes: Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Bertrand Russell and Simone de Beauvoir all wrote for Vogue under her editorship and she ran features on Gore Vidal, Isherwood, Bacon, Freud and Matisse. She employed Elizabeth David to write on food. And she was a socialist. Her serious-mindedness gave Vogue the gravitas ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and ...”

“... a philosophic self-portrait – the poseur in cavalier ringlets contemplating a skull, as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his mistress and their son out of town, then cursed his own cowardice: ‘Am I the person ...”

“... while in nearby Southease. Charlie, an Apostle (like Strachey and Leonard) and friend of Bertrand Russell, was now an eminent barrister and economist. Dora, from a Quaker family (Richard Dalloway hires Miss Kilman as Elizabeth’s tutor when he comes across her working for the Friends), had taken up philanthropy. Woolf found her high-mindedness ...”