“... As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’, yet for all its slipperiness, ‘fascism’ describes a uniquely destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better word. Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship, if left unchecked it is not only ...”

“... but none in a way that is easy to interpret. Perhaps the very act of bombing from a plane – what Richard Eberhart called ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, the gap between, in J.M. Synge’s phrase, ‘a gallous story and a dirty deed’ – made it impossible for anyone, including Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem which seems to ...”

“... challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as ‘the indispensable nation’. Among politicians and pundits, the story ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... which suffers under the additional charge of turning everything into text (‘pantextualism’, ‘wall-to-wall textuality’), will obviously have an even harder time in being read by a wide audience. Certain pronouncements like Derrida’s ‘There is no hors texte’ have become notorious: they are taken out of context as ...”

“... had best make haste … lest it dash out of the picture and be away to Charing Cross through the wall opposite.’ The National Gallery has been refashioned, the RA has moved to Piccadilly, but the train in Rain, Steam and Speed is forever hurtling towards Charing Cross. The only other painting at the National Gallery that comes close to its depiction of ...”

“... hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... 1953. On every visit the congressmen trawled for witnesses with a maximum of tabloid publicity. Richard Nixon’s career was partly forged on the first of these occasions. He served on the original committee, and would soon run for the Senate. Reagan’s earliest thoughts of switching to politics seem to have come just after the war during a sojourn at Lake ...”

“... ways in which the different frontiers were developed, the vicissitudes and purpose of Hadrian’s wall (not a defensive barrier in the Medieval sense, nor even the actual boundary of Roman Britain, but a form of frontier control). With 872 pages, 33 contributors, nine bibliographies, 167 illustrations and 195 figures, mostly maps and charts, this handsome ...”

“... in the Fifties; and the problem which confronts us anew with the demolition of the Berlin Wall – a problem which cannot be assessed (as here) simply as part of the balance-sheet of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘achievements’. Some might describe the ignorance of this dimension in a history of Britain avowedly written ‘for our day’ as culpable: it ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... and falls – splat! – to his backside on the bathroom floor. Charlie is weeping, banging on the wall with his fist. The policeman is standing, slipping, falling – splat! splat! – over and over again. Charlie turns and stumbles despairingly out of the bathroom, face buried in his sleeve. The falling rhythms catch nicely the comedy of the falling to the ...”