“... anything other than the continuance of affection and regard. In December 1881, Browning wrote to John W. Field, a friend of his and the Storys’, of a recent trip to Venice: ‘Had the Storys – all of them – been where we expected to find them – why – the arrangement would have been too perfect: I rejoice to hear they are well.’ 6 The ...”

“... at Oxford: a Fellow of Lincoln College was expelled for recommending Milton to his pupils, and John Locke was driven from Christ Church at the behest of the King. The much more extraordinary events in which Charles gained control of the City of London, packed the bench with judges like Jeffreys, purged JPs, and silenced his opponents by censorship, occupy ...”

“... The collection edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that ...”

“... Politics are three-quarters drudgery, so it takes a special ingredient to enliven the diary of a politician. Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon wrote splendid diaries because they were not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts ...”

“... for putting oneself to this task. Isherwood expressed this with typical simplicity in a letter to John Lehmann in July 1939: ‘I am so sick of being a person.’ The beginnings of his interest in Eastern religion were not easy, and this book starts out by conveying powerfully the Tennysonian quality of ‘honest doubt’ that Isherwood felt towards the whole ...”

“... at Blackheath, eating lunch at Schmidt’s or even the White Tower with the likes of Joe Ackerley, John Lehmann and, once, E.M. Forster. Though a virtual civilian, he remembers getting demobbed at Olympia, choosing from the millions of pinstriped suits and raincoats, one of which proved, in his thrifty hands and posh language, ‘longevous’. And I should ...”

“... Maynard Keynes was probably the most influential thinker that Britain has produced, at least since John Stuart Mill, and in addition he exhibited a variety of talents and achievements which together amounted to genius. Wherever 20th-century English literature is discussed, whether in America or elsewhere, Virginia Woolf’s novels and voluminous other writings ...”

“... If a comparison is wanted I should describe myself as the Marriott of the 20th century. Sir John Marriott wrote textbooks of 19th and 20th-century history. They are fairly competent and duller than mine but they enabled me to pass examinations. Marriott was also Conservative MP for York, hence a more successful politician. He was slightly to the right ...”

“... Language is one of those subjects on which it is almost impossible nowadays to say anything worth saying which is not highly controversial. That is why it takes a brave man like Professor Lyons to attempt a book which, in less than four hundred pages, aims to provide a ‘general introduction to linguistics and the study of language, intended particularly for beginning students and readers with no previous knowledge of or training in the subject ...”

“... conclusion that nobody knows, it is all a matter of taste, and not even literary taste. She quotes John Press: ‘the divergences over Edith Sitwell are inseparable from the personal, cultural, social and educational principles and prejudices which have inspired them.’ It is not really as bad as that. A rational argument about Edith’s Sitwell’s poetry is ...”

“... indicated in Martin’s denunciation of the distinguished social anthropologist/ethnomusicologist John Blacking, who (according to Martin) ‘would have almost the whole of value-culture from Bach to Britten, from Bosch to Picasso, from Donne to Dylan Thomas, consigned to the dustbin’. Apparently the continents of Asia, Africa and South America do not exist ...”

“... inviting us to an altogether more elevating conversation between C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (There is, as Cavell nicely describes it, a raging ‘thirst for talk’ in all these films.) We are hearing about the natural aristocracy that democracy needs. We are hearing about how to find what Matthew Arnold called one’s ...”

“... zone when she is shot by a frontier guard. Before this I had tried Reds, a film allegedly about John Reed. This film had only normal intercourse. It also had a good deal of political nonsense and little hint that Reed wrote the finest account there is of the Bolshevik revolution. I have been cured of film-going for a long time. I have not done much better ...”

“... No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he smiled, at first shy and then bold, everything stopped. He was the Sun King. Less the Sun King, given Halberstam’s subsequent characterisations, than Tamburlaine: but then we discover that when any one of ...”

“... this fate, and few may know that the familiar expression has a nautical origin. According to Sir John Richardson, as quoted in the OED, it happens thus: ‘when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the masts, instantly staying the inward course and giving her stern way, an accident ...”