“... it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of leaving flowers in the passage. But you never do it, or let us say, you have never done it yet.To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by ‘alleged to ...”

“... question over whether he’ll even be able to meet us, but apparently the way to get the pope to do something is to tell him not to do it, or vice versa. Jason is very much the same. He is perhaps the person, alone on earth, who would be unaffected by a papal audience. ‘Yeah,’ he says reflectively, ‘if I were ...”

“... the picture sooner; it was crumpled where her great-grandson kept picking it up to look at it.I’d come to the Campbells’ house straight from the new station on the edge of town. The first few streets I cycled through were lined with Union Jacks somebody had lashed halfway up the lamp-posts. As I approached the centre they petered out. Deirdre didn’t ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some ...”

“... upon a time a bird was ill, and a cat, bending down to it, said, “How are you and what do you want? I will give you everything, only get well.” And the bird replied, “If you go away I shan’t die.”’ ‘Is this the nonsense man?’ John Ruskin asked, after receiving a letter from Lear that detailed his latest ventures in painting. He ...”

“... editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left ...”

“... educated, and they say – in the century whose art is dominated by such images as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Duchump’s Large Glass, by Beckmann’s visions of hell – that art is about pleasure. The point is that these people are chosen not in spite of their militant complacency but because of it. The staff of the BBC are vetted by MI5 and Radio 3 has ...”

“... least signalising most of these gaps. But his footnotes are sketchy and often vague, his prelims do not extend beyond antiquarian jottings entitled ‘Particulars of the Life of Samuel Pepys’, and he does not bother about such matters as cross-references or literary allusions. In general, he does not gloss obsolete phrases or special usages: he simply ...”

“... in 1968, remains exceptionally hard to find in this country. Now the second collection, Points de Repère, issued in France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to ...”

“... he was 12, Redgrove suffered from ‘what he called “robot obsessional automatisms”, mainly to do with washing’. In his teens Redgrove began to associate mud with eroticism. His poetry returns again and again to moments connected with the sort of experience detailed in his unpublished memoir ‘Innocent Street’, where, using language familiar to ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has been reduced to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but ...”

“... so popular that her younger sister Marie took to sniffing the hats of gentleman visitors in the hall to work out who was paying court that evening. Betsy chose André, and is described as putting her hooks into him (‘mettre le grappin’). André’s parents weren’t keen, but she outmanoeuvred them, despite the difficulties of a wartime wedding. When ...”

“... up from there being so much travel: Last thing, after the doors, the windows and the light in the hall, I come up and for the fear the cat might stifle the baby I put the suitcase across the stairs. We are walled in by dreams of travel ... And the modesty of his enterprise, its accuracy, gives it a reticent charm beside the self-observant adventures of ...”