“... Still, Carr’s Dostoevsky survives in a way that the effusions on the subject of Lawrence, Gide or even Berdyaev do not, and his evocation of the Dostoevskian ‘double’ (Zosima/Ferapont or Ivan/Smerdyakov) has never been bettered. Carr’s other outstanding book of this period is The Romantic Exiles (1933). It is extraordinary that he ...”

“... We learn that Egdon Heath offered him the possibility of ‘unity of place’ and was, ‘as John Bayley astutely suggests, nothing less than “a microcosm of the dark indifferent universe in which human life has to be carried on”.’ It thus ‘becomes the perfect setting for the social, political and intellectual upheavals of the age that the novel ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... the first thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function ...”

“... brought to order when, in the end, everybody died. It was a vainglorious mishmash of Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Huxley – to name but a few. With the temerity of youthful unconsciousness I sent the typescript to Eyre and Spottiswoode (I think it was), who had announced a competition for new novels. It came back without comment. After active service with the ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... mal and Madame Bovary, not to mention the more recent legal judgments concerning James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov. Why is it that these ‘shocking’ writers, these transgressive authors, are also now labelled the most important? Foucault suggests an answer: Texts, books and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralised ...”

“... concept was revealed to the world, years later, as the Millennium Dome. But, like his namesake Dr John, the Elizabethan magus and imperial geographer, Simon Dee was exploited by the Secret State and then abandoned to provincial obscurity. Now it can be told: the Dome represents the consciousness of the lost years of Simon Dee. Finally, on Friday 12 ...”

“... books concentrate fiercely, and indeed lovingly, on just two households, that of the Reverend John Ames, and his lifelong friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, with flashbacks in Lila into the eponymous heroine’s life before she came to Gilead and married Ames and had a son with him. Gilead takes a strand from Middlemarch and turns it around. Ames, like ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton physicist John Wheeler to check the accuracy of his account of the Teller-Ulam design. Intending to read the document on the overnight train from Princeton to Washington, Wheeler managed to lose it. The sleeper car was taken apart in a desperate search, but the document ...”

“... had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time he married at the age of 21, he’d worked at a ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”