“... servants, good connections, horses, camels – and an interpreter. Many healthy, wealthy, plucky young men could have done as much. It is not surprising that he found it easier to be modest about his travels than Borrow did. Kinglake published his elegant account of his little trip nine years later, in 1844, and lived on its reputation, as ...”

“... and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the skirting of a gallery as your contribution to an exhibition, could be ...”

“... vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they placed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were ...”

“... for home use. ‘Some day this war is going to end,’ the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says in the film. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) later repeats the line, thinking how happy the young men travelling upriver with him will be when that day comes, and they can go home. ‘The trouble ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ...”

“... in Beirut was blown up by explosives packed into a pick-up truck, killing 63 people, including Robert Ames, the CIA’s chief intelligence officer for the Middle East, whose severed hand still wearing his wedding ring was found floating a mile offshore. The Israelis and Americans demonised the perpetrators of these attacks but continued to underestimate ...”

“... At some point​ in the mid-1960s, large numbers of ambitious young men in Britain and North America lost their enthusiasm for elite, male-only colleges. The prospect of spending three or four years in an exclusively masculine environment had diminishing appeal. The absence of women felt ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’, and increasingly at odds with the social and professional worlds in which the sexes now mixed relatively freely ...”

“... of independence from political control. Unlike Trump, who tried to fire the former special counsel Robert Mueller, Biden has made no attempt to breach this norm. Federal convictions differ from state convictions in one further, striking way: as Debs learned, federal convicts can be pardoned by the president, while state prisoners can be pardoned only though a ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican tradition. Robert Darnton’s objective, in this collection of essays, is to disturb the serenity of the dinner party, to bring the historian of ideas or the literary scholar down from the noble summits to the murky depths of Enlightenment. His particular concern is with ...”

“... the poem ‘says’ will be accompanied by biographical information about the author. Underneath Robert Graves’s ‘Symptoms of Love’, for instance, we learn this: ‘Scientists have recently classified love as a form of psychosis. Robert Graves knew all about this. The poet once threw himself out of a third-floor ...”

“... until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like kamikazes’.) Germaine Greer may say, uncontroversially, that ‘many a man who was attractive and amusing at 20 is a pompous old bore at 50,’ and Melvyn Bragg got a lot of stick for the novel he ...”

“... greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic ...”

“... in mind. I have two imaginary readers. One is an intelligent but ignorant 16-year-old: myself when young. The other is an intelligent but even more ignorant British civil servant, bent on improving his mind. How would these two fare with The Laws of the Game? The civil servant would, I suspect, fare very badly, if only because it might not occur to him that it ...”