“... word ‘problem’. Perhaps the best single introduction to Hamlet is the long essay that prefaces Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition. Jenkins opens his critical discussion with a sub-section entitled ‘Problems’, which begins: ‘Few, I imagine, would challenge the assertion that’ – here he quotes from Harry Levin – ‘“Hamlet is the most problematic ...”

“... for long periods’. This experience, he thought, ‘made him’. His father, he said, ‘didn’t love me and I didn’t love him either … It was very ambiguous though, because I was sexually attracted to him.’ Bacon ‘sometimes suggested he was raped, as if the grooms had stood him up against the coarse barn ...”

“... in knowing that, at last, we shall be united again, forever and for all eternity, in the love that God has given us to cherish and to increase so that we know, even now, that it is the greatest and most precious of all things in life and afterwards. If it’s a long time before we meet again, we both shall find patience and comfort in that – you ...”

“... of her stepfather, her biological father having died when she was five). ‘To write, I must love my name,’ Sontag declared, and hers snapped into place like a double-barrelled shotgun; it made for a potent byline even when she was an unknown. She also looked famous before she became famous, another sign of a protostar. Early on, she emanated a campus ...”

“... was very young, our mother asked her whom she loved best, Mummy or Daddy. My sister did in fact love Mummy best but, being of an angelic disposition, lied diplomatically: ‘I love you both the same.’ Mummy didn’t speak to her for days.Not speaking to people for days was a habit of hers. But it wasn’t always ...”

“... What the animal yearned after, when he gazed forlornly out of his cage, was the freedom to make love to Edwina of his own choice … to break into that domain which, in fact, he could not break out of.’ His speculations slip from human to operatic:Was [Percy] already in the flare-lit, grotto-ornamented, statue-sprinkled garden of Count ...”

“... added, it would be sparkling, unassailable ... It betrayed (betraying means breaking the laws of love). It engaged in pillage. And lastly, it banned itself from the world by homosexuality. It thus established itself as an indestructible solitude. Later, Genet adds: ‘Betrayal, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book.’ So be it. But ...”

“... was no point, however humble, on which [the Persians] would not consult their English friends.’ (Harold Nicolson was then Counsellor at the British Legation.) ‘They would arrive with little patterns of brocade and velvet; they would ask us to come down and approve the colour of the Throne Room ... They must have red cloth for the palace servants like the ...”

“... wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points ...”

“... scientist who felt that he had never been properly appreciated either in academia – blaming Harold Laski for stopping him getting influential jobs – or in the Labour Party, and for this he felt his wife’s extreme beliefs were partly responsible. When they married, Catlin was teaching at Cornell; hating life as a faculty wife and having found no ...”

“... of old-fashioned guerrilla types’ came ‘swarming down from the mountains to join the fun’. Harold Macmillan admitted that the partisans he saw loosing off rounds and lobbing grenades in Modena ‘caused me more alarm than our opponents’. In France the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), a mix of resistance fighters and former ...”

“... for the camera, where birthday cards were signed ‘best wishes’, where no one ever said ‘I love you’ and where Veda never played with her. Betty ‘remembers much beating of carpets and shovelling of ashes, the salting of mutton to keep it from rotting, the soaking of cucumber slices in dishes of vinegar to make them marginally more ...”

“... School of Economics was evacuated there and Cambridge genius found itself exchanging ideas with Harold Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the ...”

“... be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I shall try to show how a recognition of that contingency leads to a ...”

“... Sedunary are on display at the city’s maritime museum. So is his watch, stopped at 1.50. We’d love to do more, a local official said. Belfast has done more. Stephanie Barczewski quotes an editorial from the Belfast Telegraph of July 1999: ‘In marketing parlance, the story of the liner is a unique selling point for Northern Ireland, and could open the ...”