“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... be it is also one of the more worrying symptoms of a bizarre and poignant neurological disorder. John suffers from dysphasia – or aphasia as it is also called; and it is one of the many paradoxes of his condition that although he can hear perfectly, he cannot monitor what he is saying, or rather not saying. The buffer which in normal speech-processing ...”

“... from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to which the Russian Intelligence Service had penetrated British life. The MI5 officer quickly dispensed with the ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... a belief that Gorbachev appears still to hold. Yakovlev, however, went further and soon took the view that socialism of anything other than the social democratic type was a distortion of ‘nature’, which he defines as the market. These two sets of views, produced within the system but captive to its own inability to change without being ...”

“... what, when she turned writer, Sarraute was to call a ‘tropism’. The term is one that she took from the natural sciences, and when she adopted it she may have been thinking of Proust, who had recently made such apt and witty use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de ...”

“... Ceausescu was having built for himself when he was deposed and then killed in December 1989 – I took the train up to the Jiu Valley. It jolted and squealed north to the city of Brasov, then west through the Transylvanian Alps to Petrosani, the central town in the Valley. It was after midnight when we arrived; a late-night kiosk had some bread and ...”

“... the industrial and labour correspondents – itself a cause of bitter comment from a group that took pride in its morning bleariness – to demonstrate, with the help of charts and coloured markers, how the markets were moving inexorably against deep-mined – and relatively expensive – British coal. The pre-MacGregor Board would never have jeopardised ...”

“... a favourite method in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘No man,’ according to Byron, ‘ever took a razor in hand who did not at some time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life.’ The advent of the safety razor inhibited such morbidity. It is unlikely that anyone has ever held a Bic disposable in his hand and contemplated severing the ...”

“... it helped him, professionally or personally, being caught between worlds to quite that extent.He took early retirement in 1979, after working for the same employer for thirty years, and died suddenly in 1983. He was the age I am now. Most of my memories of him are from Hong Kong and that emotional complication is one of the reasons I don’t like going ...”

“... father when Pasmore was 18 threw him off his intended course from Harrow to university; instead he took a job with the London County Council. Painting and educating himself about art in his spare time, he began to exhibit in the 1930s with some of the most prominent interwar painters, including Ivon Hitchens, Ceri Richards and William Coldstream. With ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... John Keegan’s book is about the principles, strategy and tactics of warfare at sea and their evolution as it is exemplified in four great battles, Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and a critical period in that long struggle the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a strangely mixed book, some parts being quite remarkably good and quite unhackneyed, others dealing with matters that have been handled again and again, and doing so with no great originality ...”