“... good and evil was one that Bloch refused to countenance, and although he was careful to cite the young Marx and even Lenin himself in support of his own moral and ethical scruples, the Judeo-Christian background was never disguised. A lifetime’s preoccupation with the New Testament in particular had begun with the first (1918) edition of Geist der Utopie ...”

“... If we can believe the testimony of the effect of Ward Six on Lenin, or of Les Misérables on the young Whittaker Chambers, the bridge is also a dynamite-stick; whether a book gets used one way or the other depends to a shocking degree on the reader. Nussbaum’s vision is big-souled and communitarian; she would bring no harm to any living thing. Yet the idea ...”

“... shutdown of late 1995, ‘which had just facilitated his first two groping assignations with young Monica Lewinsky’. However, anyone reading this book hoping for some outright contrition to go along with the palpable guilt will, like Gore, come away disappointed. Clinton doesn’t do introspection: his obsessive, almost prurient interest in other ...”

“... at every bed. The message was clear. If a cripple could become president, there was hope for these young men. Most of his staff were in tears. Yet Roosevelt infuriated almost as many people as he inspired. In 1932 the columnist Elmer Davis called him someone ‘who thinks that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a ...”

“... treachery still meant. This event would have been part of the folk memory of the school when the young Anthony Blair, then still a Tory, arrived in 1966. Suez offered a young man with an interest in politics a series of case studies in the price to be paid for political recklessness, whether it was the recklessness of ...”

“... Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may have ‘pined by ...”

“... loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ Thatcher spent the next three months in a suite that cost £3660 a night. She died in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... but set half a century earlier, Ismail Kadare describes the last thirty days of the life of a young man.* On the evening of 17 March, on a road through the mountains of northern Albania, Gjorg Berisha shoots Zef Kryeqyqe dead. The killing is an act of vengeance: a year and a half earlier, Zef Kryeqyqe had shot Gjorg Berisha’s brother. That murder too ...”

“... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...”

“... dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed (not saying that I felt it was the highlight of my career). It was then they asked if I would voice ...”

“... into the scope of ‘immoral conditions’ in the local community. They recruited from among the young enlisted men stationed at the base a number of sailors who volunteered to serve as decoys and to seek out and identify men they suspected of being sexual perverts. The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”