“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”

“... gang killed 14 Catholics in the Millfield district of Belfast after a constable was shot. Although Michael Collins brought these killings to the attention of Winston Churchill during the London negotiations, Nixon was never arrested or charged. He became an embarrassment only when Sir James Craig and the Unionist hierarchy got involved with the Governments of ...”

“... There are the incongruities of grammar and phrase books for those tormented but still pellucid young sensibilities to struggle with. La Normandie est renommée par ses falaises et ses fromages.     What are Normandy, cliffs, cheeses and fame? Too many words on the look-out for too many meanings.     Too many syllables for the tongue to ...”

“... The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Berta Ruck called her ‘the Duchess’. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband’s disdain for the suffragettes: ‘Votes for women ...”

“... the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918, his admirers were taken by surprise. This gifted young man from an affluent Jewish background, then aged 33, had previously devoted himself exclusively to cultural pursuits. After coming into prominence around 1905 as one of the instigators of the Hungarian intellectual revival, he had gone on to make his mark ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash ...”

“... debt and unemployment. Leadsom said the thing was not to create jobs but to make it easier for young people to start their own businesses. ‘The average young person is not going to start a business,’ Krugman said. You don’t have to be too clever to outwit a Tory ideologue. That day Krugman also went on the BBC’s ...”

“... has faced the choice of war or peace on some ten or twelve occasions during my lifetime. I was too young to have an opinion on the outbreak of the First World War, then known as the Great War. Thereafter I assumed I should always be against war even when it was conducted in the name of collective security. I opposed going to war over Manchuria in 1932 and ...”

“... whether I’m right or wrong.’ But if you’re going to believe in angels, it seems to me (young fogey that I am), it ought to be with at least a little bit of awe. Here’s Milton, for instance, describing Michael’s heavenly forces setting out to do battle with Satan and his rebellious hordes (from Book Six of ...”

“... is a public discussion forum dedicated to the conflict in Northern Ireland. It was founded by Michael O’Hare, who, as a young man in County Armagh, had seen the violence and disdain with which British soldiers could treat Catholic families such as his own. In 1976, a British paratrooper shot dead his 12-year-old ...”

“... the red hat which I’d always thought by Carpaccio, but isn’t now, and also the Portrait of a Young Man by Baldassare Estense. I don’t care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living no much different from that of the dead; still, I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in ...”

“... a tally of planks, posts and bricks. I wasn’t the only one either. There were other intelligent young men with notebooks with me. We were indispensable. The hotel was to be five storeys high. It was the tallest building anywhere within ten miles. White, tall, lonely, it stuck out over the world. Our old people, who didn’t think much of progress, were ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... chimes regularly, it is all very regular, even the drunks are regular in their drunkenness. The young people regularly long for London or hanker after Hollywood, finding reality in soap operas, perhaps not seeing the soap opera in their own realities. In the reality of Josie Keenan, abused by her father, raised in a clay-cold, loveless, nun-fusty ...”