“... abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one day the swift evolution from Desert Shield through Imminent Thunder to Desert Storm will make a great feast for an analytical historian. For now, everything in Washington has narrowed to a saying of John Kennedy’s, uttered after the Bay of Pigs, to the effect that ...”

“... war? Even protection of his own cover as a Russian agent would have been less precious than the swift elimination of Penkovsky. Robert Cecil, who was working under Maclean at the Foreign Office when he bolted, insists there was no tip-off from a traitor in British intelligence to the effect that Maclean’s interrogation could start as soon as the following ...”

“... spies, expatriates, soldiers and so on. It proceeds as certain action movies do, except that the swift location changes are metaphysical. And there is an undoubted metaphysical vulgarity, a melodrama, here. Stone might reply that he is describing a concatenation of metaphysical vulgarities, the kind exaggerated by Jerusalem, but his novel’s inability to ...”

“... Burne-Jones was good at line. ‘Line flowed from him almost without volition,’ the artist Graham Robertson remembered; Ruskin thought his ‘moving hand’ as ‘tranquil and swift as a hawk’s flight’. The odd insistence in some quarters that he couldn’t draw is belied by some of his portrait sketches, notably ...”

“... frequently an unpleasant one. Anne Bradstreet writes on the fire which destroyed her house, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, ‘On Himself, upon Hearing What Was His Sentence’. All three discover consolation in a faith which enables Graham to relish the thought of his own execution: Open all my veins, that I may swim ...”

“... on her.’ Naturally this too is a hopeless love: ‘she lives in a world of games and speed and swift thought … and straight, slim, eager girls.’ Jean is no dupe. She knows how mass-market romance is pedalled and how easily the heartstrings can be plucked. On holiday with her father, she watches ‘filmacting’ from a ‘topping’ perch in Mullion ...”

“... part of its routine background checks for important government nominees. The evangelist Franklin Graham and various Republicans claim that since Kavanaugh did not actually rape Ford, but merely assaulted and groped her, and then stopped, his honourable character is evident.Because of death threats, Dr Ford is forced to move her family into hiding.(As a ...”

“... reason to be grateful. The thought occurs, though, that Lawrence had more in common with James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, than with any other historical figure. A man appears among undeveloped traditional tribal people. He can communicate with them and has a deep sympathy for their ways, not at all shared by his peers. Demonstrating a blessed failure of ...”

“... life was for. Most of Foot’s household gods were to remain the same all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making ...”

“... lineage of Irish licensed jesters from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan (Terry Wogan and Graham Norton are minor offshoots), men who punctured English pomposity and found moral earnestness irresistibly comic, yet whose capacity to amuse rendered them more or less acceptable. It was a perilous role to play, as Shaw’s friend and admirer Oscar Wilde ...”

“... persuaded the owner to take her on as an apprentice. It’s from that moment that we can date her swift maturation. Back in Paris, where she bought an apartment on the rue Bonaparte, she began to collaborate with a Japanese specialist called Seizo Sugawara, who had come to the city in 1900 to repair lacquer pieces on show at the Universal Exhibition. The ...”

“... Literary friendships (Sidney and Greville, Pope and Swift, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot and Pound) have interest for the critic as well as the biographer. They show how unlike temperaments of near-equivalent talent may be drawn together by unanimity of literary principle. This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems ...”

“... harm’s way. With their advertisements on television paid for by well-connected Republicans, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have turned this chicanery into an opinion-poll-smashing juggernaut. To a person from another planet, or perhaps another country, the success of this campaign would appear unlikely or even impossible: man of courage and conscience ...”

“... believed a win would be good for the nation, the mind of Ireland freed, raw body, old head, albeit Swift died mad. The ‘Irish Salamis’ is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy ...”

“... Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project – ‘is curiously ...”