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“... narrator-hero Casaubon reflects at the end, as he awaits probable liquidation at the hands of the Masters of the Hollow World, that ‘the certainty is that there is nothing to understand.’ ‘I understood the Kingdom and was one with it,’ he continues, eating a peach and contemplating the vines where once the dinosaurs wandered about. ‘The rest is only ...”

“... his innate caution in strategic affairs, his lack of ruthlessness when dealing with his political masters, and his frequent inability to communicate with them adequately – defects well brought out in this book – make it understandable that his undoubted talents were so regularly dispensed with. Wavell’s significance today lies less in his dispiriting ...”

“... to their ‘second fathers’, ‘admirable friends’ and so on, but it is of course what their masters expected them to say. The patron-client relationship shapes the very documents which purport to describe it. Unlike Margaret King, Donald Queller does not hesitate for a moment between the rival interpretations of the Venetian patriciate. According to ...”

“... used to accord only to the great imaginative writers of their own time? Why have these masters produced so many eager disciples? Why has Literary Theory (thus capitalised) become an independent field rather than a serviceable set of working assumptions that enables critical commentary? In Patrick Parrinder’s account of this major change in ...”

“... he knows he is – knows what his absurdity is for – another. Ah, Helsinki in 2018! Only true masters of the medium know how to perform in front of the cameras like this. Signalling power, impatience, suspicion, superciliousness – not so much aimed in the direction of one’s fellow leader (that was part of the scandal), more at the spectacle ...”

“... In Anthony Burgess’s latest novel, Earthly Powers, there is a parody of a Betjeman poem. Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the word’s white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel’s food. In a brilliant piece of word play the angel food cake of the children’s tea-party becomes the Host: sex, worship and childhood come together on the tip of the darting tongue that demurely holds it ...”

“... Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by Anthony Nutting: ‘he had for too long been the Golden Boy of the Tory Party, the glamorous Crown Prince awaiting the summons to mount the throne in place of the ageing Emperor ...”

“... and therefore suffering from the same nostalgia syndrome). In a review (in the New Republic) of Anthony Lane’s book Nobody’s Perfect, Thomson, aged sixtyish, compares a non-exhaustive list of the movies available for Pauline Kael to review in the 1970s with those reviewed in the New Yorker by Lane, aged between 30 and 40. Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie ...”

“... on printers’ archives in Leiden, Antwerp and Rome. The volume confirms, if it needed confirming, Anthony Grafton’s unrivalled capacity, within Renaissance studies, to combine high learning (‘the correctors studied here were hardly typical,’ he notes, with some pride) with the ability to make potentially arid archival sources ...”

“... too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in opinions. She treats somewhat ...”

“... I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’ On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon ...”

“... Brown. Much the same happens with work by non-politicians. Two very good non-extremist studies, Anthony Quinton’s The Politics of Imperfection and Noel O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, appear, but they are almost alone. Norton and Aughey’s Conservatives and Conservatism is well beyond Honderich’s ken. Even Lord Coleraine’s right-wing For Conservatives ...”

“... Martin Ceadel’s begins in 1730 but is really about the first half of the 19th century, while Anthony Howe’s is really about the second half of that century although it continues until 1946. Ceadel’s is largely pioneering in its subject-matter, while Howe picks his way through a dense historiography. Both will become standard works. ‘For the best ...”

“... often modelled themselves on Chandler and Runyon, but they had more to write about. They became masters of a deadpan style which exploited the comical, the bizarre and the absurd. There was no shortage of material. You only had to look around and speculate – for example, on a film poster in which Nat King Cole is airbrushed from his seat and the blonde ...”

“... is rigidly hierarchical. The players are subject to the authority of the ‘Wizards’ – masters and architects of the game. The more democratic MOOs foster role-playing of an exploratory kind. The environment of the MOO is an infinitely extendable constellation of ‘rooms’ and conversazioni. Two variants have proved successful. With social MOOs ...”