“... question here. Why should Archer, normally so bumptious about his Struggle from Log Cabin to White House, miss out so much of the log-cabin experience? A clue may lie in the curriculum vitae which Archer submitted to Cobb in 1961, and was later obtained by Levy of the Mail to help him with his ‘background’ piece during Archer’s libel action (Daily ...”

“... of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for being more concerned with experience than with explanation, for relying too much on frequently-recycled quotations, and for the way in which one book is so often ...”

“... was formerly the greatest coal town in the country. Now the country is ploughland, interspersed by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is ...”

“... into the sea, and can usually be induced to leave long before this becomes a possibility; the white population of Zimbabwe has fallen by 70 per cent since the end of minority rule, without having experienced anything more than sporadic intimidation. Were what has long been hailed as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to become the site of ...”

“... one. A story, probably apocryphal, relates that when he returned from his voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus was ridiculed by members of the Spanish court: any fool, they said, could have accomplished what he had been so richly rewarded for doing. In reply Columbus challenged them to make an egg stand upright. The greybeard nobles tried and ...”

“... powerboat racing career. He entered the 1963 Daily Express race in his top of the range boat The White Migrant and his schoolfriend, who was at Lord’s for the day, recalls the story unfolding in headlines in the Evening Standard. At lunchtime it was ‘Surprise Leader in Powerboat Race’; by close of play it was ‘Powerboat Sinks’. ‘Well,’ his ...”

“... A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including the ‘opulent ...”

“... team regularly plays, and plays very traditionally with no lurid lycra kit but in immaculate white flannels and caps. The players seem to be largely taxi drivers, their cabs parked on the road or, as today, by the actual field. With no interest in cricket we’re both of us cheered by this old-fashioned spectacle and the players who go to the trouble to ...”

“... made of the Quatuor – a fact which oddly passes without comment in the useful discography by Christopher Dingle that concludes Hill’s book. The Germans were not unsympathetic to these musical endeavours. The camp commander supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper, and found a cello, with one string missing, for Pasquier. A German officer gave Messiaen ...”

“... give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays and films (I Am a Camera and Liza ...”

“... world: one is his drum, or rather series of drums, made of tin, the sides painted with red and white triangles, the colours of the Polish Army. (The present writer recollects a string of grey stallions of the Polish cavalry, a couple of tall red-and-white drums slung from each, parading on a brilliant Sunday morning in ...”

“... is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.) One of my favourites ...”

“... at the lodgings he shared with Dee in Prague near the Bethlehem Chapel: E.K.: I see a garland of white rose-buds about the border of the stone: they be well-opened. But while I consider these buds better, they seem rather to be white lilies. They are 72 in number, seeming with their heads, alternatim, one to bend or hang ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... and do the same in turn. The events, as they remember them, will chafe against one another. The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer ...”